anti-word

[Thomas Ward]

Rest assured Sun Micro is working on making Star Office 6 accessible with
Gnopernicus. How accessible it will be in the end is open to debate until it
shows up.
Coming up with a shell based wordprocessor would be dificult and time
consuming, and in the end Gnome 2.0 will be out before any of us could
complete a vary good release.

----- Original Message -----
From: Yvonne Smith <yvonne at thewatch.net>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Sunday, January 13, 2002 1:46 AM
Subject: Re: anti-word


> Good grief, a text mode word clone? The amount of work involved in
> that would be out of this world. I think our only hope here, people,
> is to hope the eventual speech access to gnome will give us access to
> some of the word processors in Linux that save in word format. None of
> them are perfect, but I think an xwindows screen reader would be a lot
more
> productive than trying to write such a beast.
> And no, this is not a prelude to the "we don't need xwindows" rant
> that I just know someone is going to reply to this with. I'm with you
> on this, ok? I might not use speakup much, being a primarily emacspeak
> user <no, *that* isn't worth going on a rant about either, I learnt
> emacspeak first and only use speakup occasionally when necessary,
> personal preference>. Basically I'm much happier in a console or in
> emacs myself. All I'm saying is that, I can't imagine too many people
> other than us would have a huge amount of use for a word processor
> like that. I seem to have vague memories of a console version of word
> perfect existing at one point, if you bought the commercial version
> but don't quote me on it. I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist now in any
> case. What I'm trying to say is, right now, we just have to live with
> what we've got. If we want to do more than read word documents, we've
> got to run windows until someone writes a screen reader that'll let us
> use star office or something of the sort. If we want to use
> javascript, we've got to use windows until someone writes a screen
> reader that'll let us use netscape or Galion or something. I know, I
> know, it's harsh, but most sighted people aren't going to write these
> for us in console mode. They can already use all this stuff in x, and
> open source, like it or not, usually involves people writing what they
> personally have a use for. If none of us can or have the time to write
> this stuff ourselves, most likely it isn't going to get done.
>
> I know, this is harsh, and is probably going to result in me being
> flamed off the list, since I'm not a regular contributor, or a regular
> user of speakup, but while I'm here, I thought I'd say it. The same
> thing applies to kirk, and whoever else writes speakup. They'll write
> what they need first, and afterwards what other people want if they
> have the time and feel it's worth it. To get better service than that,
> you've either got to get involved in a project that more closely
> mirrors what you need in a program, learn to program yourself and
> write it yourself, or live with the decisions that the programmers
> make. That's just the way it is in the open source world, I'm
> afraid. As someone who doesn't know, and probably never will know c or
> c++, I'm in the same position as most of you. We can make suggestions,
> we can make bug reports, and we can help new users with what we know
> and they don't yet, to pay for what they give us, but that's about
> it.
> As it is, at least with speakup or emacspeak or something like that,
> we can talk to the developers. It isn't going to cost us thousands of
> dollars for access to what software's available and what we get might
> more closely resemble what we want, rather than what primarily sighted
> developers think we want.
>
> and finally, just to end this rant and reply to another thread,
> hardware vs software synthe. again, software speech is something we're
> all just going to have to live with. I prefer hardware speech myself,
> but I'm not using it much right now. I'm moving around all the time,
> often have limited space for things, and I just don't want to fuss
> with the cables and junk that the hardware synthe brings. Not only
> that, the amount a hardware synthe costs can put it out of reach for a
> lot of people. Not to mention, using a laptop with a hardware speech
> synthe can be a *major* pain in the neck, as a lot of you can
> testify. It's not something to get into a religious war about. When
> Tuxtalk is eventually written, those people who don't have a hardware
> synthe, for whatever reason, will just have to live with the fact that
> they won't be able to see the early bootup messages. 95% of times,
> that doesn't matter at all. And in my case, I'll probably end up using
> both, depending on which is more practical, so if I really get into
> trouble, I can plug the hardware synthe in and figure out why it is
> that my linux kernel has suddenly decided not to talk to me. But you
> aren't going to lose what speakup can currently give you. If you're
> still using hardware for speech, you'll still get the same output as
> speakup has always given you, and people who can't or don't want to
> use a hardware synthe will have access to the linux console, at least,
> which'll probably bring more blind people into linux, which is a good
> thing by anyones standards.
>
> Now I'm out of here before I rant any more, and going to duck into my
> flameproof bunker for a while.
>
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