Screen Reader

[Doug Lawlor]

Hi Carl:

To answer this question on the state of readyness regarding Orca, the 
screen reader built into Ubuntu, we must ask the question: What does 
this person want to use the screen reader for?

I use it here every day for reading my mail using Thunderbird 3.0, 
browse the web with firefox, doing various things with gnome-terminal, 
listening to music with the totum movie player, text editing with gedit, 
word processing with open office, using various administration tools 
such as synaptic package manager, network-manager, gdmsetup, plus others.

Regarding reading mail with Thunderbird: it will be necessary for this 
person to download the latest nightly build from 
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/latest-trunk/. This 
is a tar ball which the user must extract into a directory, I use my 
home directory, and then he will execute the thunderbird shell script 
inside the thunderbird directory which will be created by decompressing 
the thunderbird tar ball. The reason that the user must perform this 
step is because Thunderbird 2.0, which is shipped with ubuntu, does not 
contain the necessary accessibility requirements for Orca to work with 
it. If this user is more used to using Microsoft outlook for email he 
can use Evolution, which is reported to work well with Orca. I don't use 
this email client myself so can't comment on it directly.

	I don't know if the above comments have been helpful but feel free to 
write back to the list with more questions.

Doug

Carl Wuensche wrote:
> Is there any update on more support for the screen reader? I have a
> friend whom is blind, he'd love to use Ubuntu but the screen reader
> isn't that great yet. He is using JAWS for windows.
>