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.