Re: ABIWord Problem

On Mon, 11 Dec 2006, Howard Traxler wrote:

> Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2006 06:49:02 -0600
> From: Howard Traxler <htraxler2@earthlink.net>
> To: abiword-user@abisource.com
> Subject: ABIWord Problem
>
>
> Hi all,
> I hope I haven't already asked this one, but:
>
> I teach at a center for deaf-blind. We use JAWS software to read the screen
> and present it in speech and Braille output. So far, all the menus and
> dialogs work fine; but when typing into the editor, JAWS can't find anything
> to read. Kind of like back in the DOS days when a program wrote directly to
> the screen memory rather than through BIOS. Does anyone know a a setting I
> can change or maybe a mod I can do?

There is no easy answer for this at the moment unfortunately.

JAWS spent years fighting their way through to force their product to work
with Microsoft Word. The source code for Abiword is freely available, if
they (JAWS) wanted to work with Abiword there is very little standing in
their way. The source code for JAWS is not available. There is very
little information available telling us what we might need to do to make
it easier for companies like JAWS to fix their software.

This is certainly something the Abiword team would like to improve but
more information is needed. There are existing bug reports in the Abiword
bug tracker but without more information it is extremely difficult for
developers to address the problems (I dare say it is as difficult as
trying to fix problems with Arabic or Chinese if you do not speak those
langauges)
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=9789

Alternatives do exist, you might want to try out a fully Gnome based
Desktop system and use the Accessibility tools such as the Orca screen
reader.
http://www.gnome.org/projects/orca/

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
http://alanhorkan.livejournal.com/

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Received on Mon Dec 11 14:13:17 2006