orca and firefox

while visually impared people have been able to use the internet since the advent of emacspeak (by the way emacspeak came much before any windows based screen readers), the real power of surffing the net came with a few proprietory softwares like Jaws for Windows.
It was jaws which opened the dores for internet access for blind computer users. Jaws led the way for providing ease of use, almost seamless integration with most of the web sites and also helped those who were interested in the format and structure of the web page.

However this was not all that a blind person would need to work along side a sighted colligue when working on the internet.



The most important shortcoming of jaws and similar softwares is that they use a concept of a vertual buffer for presenting the web page in an accessible way.


This means that the real layout of the page being accessed is hidden by the screen reader and what a blind user gets is a left to right top to bottom page with the text aligned in words and lines and links arranged as one link per line.
The other major issue of the vertual buffer is that the forms have to be accessed pritty differently.

The jaws screen reader provides what is called as a "forms mode ".
The user has to hit enter on the first form field and start filling up the form or choosing items from the drop down.
At any given point of time if the user wants to access the page and read the parts not related to the form, escape needs to be pressed.
This means that there will be many situations where the information around the form field will not be read out to the user unless the enter and exit forms mode is not executed.

The orca free screen reader for GNU/Linux takes a totally different approach.

Although jaws was the leader in web accessibility as far as the blind users are concerned, It was essentially not the best solution. However for some time it was the *only* solution, good or bad.

Orca is a screen reader developed by the community and has got the end users involved in development right from its inception.
The General consensus about the web accessibility as far as orca is concerned has been based on 2 main principles.
1, Keep it modular and
2, Present the web page "as is " without creating a so called virtual buffer.
In the first case the advantage is that many features can be incorporated from third parties.
The links list extention in mozila firefox is the best example.
the links list and headings list features have been there in jaws for a long time and orca needed them very badly.
But it was the decision of the majority in the community that every feature should not be dumped into orca itself.
Now firefox has many good features which are provideing high level of accessibility not just with orca but any other screen reader (if any ).
The second decision of keeping the presentation as is has always been a matter of debate and still continues to be discussed on the orca mailing list.
However the bennifits of keeping it as is have been clearly seen.
For one thing users can easily navigate around the pages and find the information they need.

This is not to say that all web sites are accessible out-of-the-box.
There are many sites which are accessible with jaws and not by orca.
similarly there are web sites which are accessible with orca but not with jaws.
So this is relative factor but the important pint is that the user can at least come to know how the page looks and a properly designed web site is any ways accessible to almost all screen readers. But in orca's case users can explore the pages and find out for themselves what they want to find.
They can instently understand that a page is badly designed because it is presented as it looks to the sighted user, uggly or beautiful.
As far as the structure of the page is concerned, again not vertually buffering it into some thing else gives the exact idea of the structure.
These reasons have created compeling accessibility on the web using orca.
The only thing now needed is to further enhance the development and since orca is free as in freedom,
this seams to be an obvious proposition.

free software Opens employment for the blind

"I think you are very capable for this job and I wished to employ you. But I am sorry, I can't spend that much for your software so that you work in my office ".
Jaws, Window-eyes and many other proprietory softwares have given rise to a bottleneck in employing the visually impaired people. Why should we expect an employee to pay for a license for some talking software to employ a blind person?
the employer would find another capable sighted person who can do the same job.
What if the blind person becomes ready to buy the software? Well, these softwares are generally quite costly and thus the salary to a great extent is lost for some months on just the software license.
What's more, the software can't be copied and used in other places.
Further more if at all the employer spends that money on the license (I am aware of a few organisations who would do that for their blind employees ), what if that employee leves the organisation?
So the investment is gone for a tos.

So the wonders and marvel of feature rich proprietory screen readers have so far not been so successful in creating the expected employment opportunities for the blind community, specially in countries like India.
But there could be a simple solution if cost was the only issue.

Government could be properly advised to create policies where proprietory softwares could be made available at no cost or low cost.



This solution has 2 problems. Not all the governments are capable or willing to do this.
And by creating such a policy or helping to create one is an terrorist attempt to encourage the mafiya of software developers who want to deny the basic freedom to the users of technology of today, and impose their powre on the users.
This also applies to technologies for the handicap like the screen reading softwares.

The bennifits of free software or what are called as open source softwares are beyond costs.
yes the softwares are available at no charge and that is a great releaf for many not so economically well to do blind people. But these softwares are free as in "freedom " and although users may incur costs on the software like installation, trainning or customisation, the money and time spent is worth the freedom.

This is because free software respects the user's freedom. This means that the software can be copied freely, can be modified to suit particular need or can be re distributed amongst the community having the same needs.
All this is an aspect of basic freedom.
And dis respecting them and denying control of one's own technology is the main aim of proprietory software for obvious reasons.
This is obvious because it is very easy to exployte people in need, particularly handicap people by denying any kind of control or customisation.

This is therefore not some thing which we as free software advocates should forget and we should not encourage policy makers to give any kind of promotion to the use of proprietory software.

Ok, this might sound very philosophical, but think about this.
If Information Communication technology can compensate to a great extent, the physical disability of some person or a group of people, then will it be fair on the part of we civil citisons to exployte that weekness?

Ok now here is the practical problem with proprietory softwares. Since proprietory softwares deny freedom. There is no possibility of customising it. Take for example a possibility where a screen reader has to work with some software developed for a particular organisation?

Now the screen reader may or may not work properly with that software. The screen reader might not be prepared for the possibility which that custom tailor made software poses.

This is not just a theory but a real case.

A capable blind person in Kerala (a southern state of India ) had to loos his job in a very well reputed and famous 5* hotel in India because the jaws screen reader he was used to working with did not jell with the customised software which was implemented in that hotel. In a non technical terms, the jaws screen reader did not give any feedback or response when he tried to use it with the software system in that hotel.
This renderd his costly licensed software useless. It did not speak when it was most needed as he says.

But then the Freedom Scientific company could be approached for getting the modification done. Agreed that jaws can be scripted. But this software and many other such softwares are only as good as a technical marvel and having lots of featurs giving a limited range of software accessibility.

My view should not be taken as an "anti jaws " ranting.

And if at all it is a "ranting" then it is against all proprietory softwares including but not limited to screen readers for blind computer users.

I am trying to make a practical point. And yes, how can we forget that no proprietory speech synthesizer or screen reader provide support in many local languages. This is true specially in a country like India.

But "beggers are not choosers, already we have a dirth of technologies. We have no right to demand ". Trust my words, I have herd this filthy statement from many people who claim to work for betterment of handicap people through employment generation.


And such dirty degradation comes from those who don't respect others.



The scripting model can't do much beyond creating some enhancements to already accessible softwares.
In common man's language, the proprietory screen reader can just be customised to the level permitted by its developres.

indeed they too are aware in many cases that there are free software alternatives for screen readers.

I personally head a project at the Electronic Corporation of Tamilnadu (ELCOT) where we train hundreds of Blind people to use free software and the government is doing early interventions in creating employment opportunities for those people.

We train people to use the GNU/linux OS and ubuntu being the most accessible, well supported and highly accessible distro, it is naturally our firstly choice. orca the free screen reader has in many ways gone beyond what a proprietory screen reader can provide.

I think that "the software is not complete yet " kind of atittude in the developres is the major driving force behind such a rapid development of the orca screen reader.
Just like Tamilnadu, Kerala has taken serious steps to make blind people aware of the employment opportunities which can be opened up if they switch to free software.
I have been conducting huge workshops and hands-on seminars for last 18 months in that state to create free software awareness. This year, The space foundation and the Kerala state government took another step ahead in this direction.
I am coordinating the Insight project to help create awareness in the corporate world about the potentials of blind people both as managers and programmres, and as non technical computer users and as data analysts.
These are a few categories where blind people can work with ease using free software or open source technologies.
There are meny questions raised during these process of awareness workshops and conferences.
the questions mainly focus on integration of technologies. Like for example a big multi national company in Trivandrum asked a question about documentation and report writing capabilities of blind people.
"how can a blind person create rich, well formatted and structured reports"? they generally think about office productivity suites.
They were surprised when I informed about the possibility of blind people creating rich pdf documents or any format for that matter.
The simple anser to the "how " was "use LaTeX ".
This is just one example. Firefox is pritty accessible so is the pidgin messenger.
There is high level of accessibility with spreadsheet in open office and orca blends very well.
Now with all the examples discussed above, one can imagine the possibilities.
I just listed a few things not even mentioning the possibility of system administration. We all know that most of the world's servers run non microsoft technologies and generally they run gnu/linux servers.
The command line has been accessible since ages. Speakup and yasr are a few examples of commandline based screen readers.

And how can we forget the emacs with the emacspeak talking system.
We can easily understand that there are more options for blind people on the free software side than proprietory software.
This is obviously because of the fact that a lot of programmres respect freedom of their users and thus keep the code open for future improvements which genrally come from the community.
Now the final question. Given all these ideological and practical facts which meet at a certain point, should we still promote proprietory screen readers?
Krishnakant.