Re: Exploring LibreOffice Accessibility with Accerciser.

Hi Dattatray,

In addition to Jason's comments below, I'd like to weigh in from a 
historical perspective...

Many years ago, we decided to only expose Accessibles for the visible 
content in OOo because of the huge memory hit doing otherwise would 
involve for a large document.  For this reason we worked on an 
AccessibleDocument interface as a way to iterate over large content like 
in Writer.  I don't recall the more recent history relating to 
implementing that interface there.

At this point, I suspect Jason's recommendations are the better route; 
or to explicitly special case Writer and use the Writer/UNO APIs for 
getting this information directly.


Regards,

Peter

On 4/17/2012 12:26 AM, Jason White wrote:
> Dattatray Bhat<[email protected]>  wrote:
>
>> Thanks for the prompt response. I am working on Orca screen reader. I want
>> to add a feature that would provide the user with a document summary
>> including all elements (headings, tables, form elements etc.) irrespective
>> of whether they are on-screen or off-screen.
> I'm wondering whether this would be better written in LibreOffice itself or as
> an extension rather than as an Orca script.
>
> I don't know either way, but I am concerned about screen readers that
> implement features which really ought to be part of the application, e.g.,
> navigable lists of links/document outlines etc.
>
> I can think of three disadvantages:
>
> 1. Only screen reader users can access the feature even if it would be helpful
> to others.
>
> 2. All of the processing has to be carried out over the accessibility
> interface by the screen reader, whereas it would be faster if the application
> took care of it.
>
> 3. The code of the screen reader becomes more complex. There is more
> application-specific code that has to be maintained by screen reader
> developers indefinitely into the future and which has to keep up with changes
> in the application.
>
> I don't know what you're proposing and I am not well qualified to give an
> opinion on whether your feature should be written in Orca or in LibreOffice.
> Rather, I am expressing a general concern about the push for more and more
> complex, application-specific, interactive features in screen readers which I
> think should be resisted.
>
> In the free software world, we also have the advantage that changes can be
> made to applications and extensions can be written, so it doesn't have to be
> done in the assistive technology.
>
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-- 
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Peter Korn | Accessibility Principal
Phone: +1 650 506 9522 <tel:+1%20650%20506%209522>
Oracle Corporate Architecture Group
500 Oracle Parkway | Redwood City, CA 94065
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