What is "OpenOffice.org's Universal Access code"

oihenart · Keymaker Joined: Apr 26, 2004 Posts: 81

Hello,

I read in the forum about NeO 3 Early Access that the only OpenOffice.org feature that is missing from NeoOffice 3.0 Early Access is Mac OS X Universal Access support.

What it is exactly ?

Thanks for this release !

Christian

narf · The Anomaly Joined: Jan 21, 2007 Posts: 1075

I am moving this to the NeoOffice Early Support forum in case other Early Access users have the same question.

Mac OS X's Universal Access allows disabled users to access applications.

Here is a link which describes a bit more about what Mac OS X Universal Access is and how to use it. The 4th bullet item "Make the computer read aloud the text ..." is not present in NeoOffice 3.0. This has never been supported in NeoOffice.

I hope this helps answer your question. Please let us know if you need some more information.

--fran

oihenart · Keymaker Joined: Apr 26, 2004 Posts: 81

Ok, thanks for this quick answer !

Christian

ovvldc · Posted: Wed Jan 14, 2009 3:27 pm Post subject:

I don't quite get this. The things Fran mentions works just fine.

if I select some text and select 'start speaking text' from the NeoOffice::Services::Speech menu, it speaks...

Best wishes,
Oscar

Samwise · Posted: Wed Jan 14, 2009 3:39 pm Post subject:

narf · The Anomaly Joined: Jan 21, 2007 Posts: 1075

OPENSTEP · Posted: Wed Jan 14, 2009 9:07 pm Post subject:

The original intention of VoiceOver is to provide assistance through speech by reading the tooltip of the button under the mouse, the selected text under the mouse, etc. automatically as the mouse moves around the screen. The goal is to provide an audio-only interface to applications so they may be used by the blind or visually impaired.

During development of Neo 3.0 we came to the following conclusions regarding Sun's implementation of this technology:

It is not thread safe. This causes it to cause application crashes that can be difficult to debug and reproduce. We do not consider it to be safe code to include in a shipping product, so we have removed it.
It provides too much information. After playing with it for a while, in our opinion there is too much static to determine what is going on.
It seems more like a feature to comply with a Section 508 checkmark for government software sales.

For a long time, we have supported the functionality of ShapeShifter which allows for the construction of high-contrast themes for the visually impaired (or anyone that wants less eye strain Smile

). Our solution should also support any other similar assistive product that patches Mac OS X at a lwo level. We feel this is a better solution for the visually impaired than the audio-only solution. We think we still can meet Section 508 standards, and prefer to continue supporting the assistive solution requested by our own users using ShapeShifter and similar standardized frameworks. For certain individuals, this may be a much more productive approach in place of relying on a confusing audio-only solution. Our users already have already compelling high-contrast solutions in place and have had them for years; we need to ensure they continue to function and are available for all of our users.

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