orca/lsr comparison wanted

[Sean Murphy]

Hi,

My early findings for XWindow Screen Readers are as follow:

1.  Firefox is scheduled to have useable support in the first quarter next 
year.  There is some support now, but there is a lot of features which are 
lacking.  Once Firefox has this support, then either screen reader will work 
fine with the web.  The Firefox developers are working closely with Sun and 
IBM to get this to work.

2.  Star Office is can be used.  But you cannot detect tables, bullet 
points, and other Word Process features.  You can navigate through the 
document.  Once again, Sun is adding a lot more support to the Open Office 
standard to improve accessibility.  I have heard this is earmarked to be 
ready by mid next year.

3.  The terminal environment of gnome works fine.  I have not tryed this 
with LSR.
4.  I haven't yet tested the mail environment.I have used Software Dectalk 
in Orca with no problems.  A college has used IBM TTS via the Emacspeak 
Server with no problems with both LSR and Orca.

LSR is very simular to how Jaws For Windows works.
If you compare this to the Windows world, XWindow has managed to come a long 
way and I expect in the next 12 months you will be able to use Star Office, 
FireFox and Mail with no problems.  Other programs I cannot say.  I would 
not use festival because it is a painful TTS.

Sean