Re: AbiWord 2.4 accessiblity with JAWS

On Mon, 15 May 2006, Angus at InfoForce Services wrote:

> Date: Mon, 15 May 2006 13:02:25 -0700
> From: Angus at InfoForce Services <angus@infoforce-services.com>
> To: abiword-dev@abisource.com
> Subject: AbiWord 2.4 accessiblity with JAWS
>
>
> I downloaded AbiWord 2.4 and installed it on my Windows XP Home SP2 PC. I
> tryed it with JAWS 6.2 and JAWS 7.1 after changeing the default colours to
> black background and white foreground (negative image) which most low vision
> people will use. I maintain two web sites that use different colours. One
> has a deep red background and wite text. And the other is a midnight blue
> background with white text. Chooseing colours is easy since I am using Hex
> values.

I am glad that functionality works well for you.

> Both JAWS would not read the document window until I did a select all. Why
> will JAWS read the OpenOffice Document window? Am I missing something?

Abiword is developed entirely by volunteers in their free time.
You might be interested to read this document:
http://www.abisource.com/support/expectations.phtml

JAWS is a professional product with paid developers. We would certainly
appreciate if they could fix their product to work with Abiword. If they
could even suggest changes needed to make abiword work better with their
software the developers might be able to help them but it is very
difficult for the Abiword developers to know how JAWS has failed and how
to work arond the flaws in their software without more information. (I
believe it took many years before they were able to make the changes need
to work with Microsoft Word but the source code for abiword is freely
available and if they wanted they could help out anytime so please do ask
them to try.)

There are other possibilities you might want to try, including running
Linux and using the built in Accessibility tools (ATK).

If you are a programmer any help you could provide to help improve
accessibility in Abiword would be appreciated.

There are not very many reports about accessibility in the abiword bug
tracking system. There is a long standing report which acknowledges the
developers would like to improve accessibility:
"FCC 508 accessibility regulation compliance"
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2145

There is another report related to improving the accessibility of Abiword
on Linux and better integration with ATK (the built in accessibility
toolkit).
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=4736

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
Received on Mon May 15 22:29:15 2006