Category: Geeks r Us
Good day to all. Adding to the other Mac topics out there I encourage the following. For as long as VoiceOver has been available there have not been accessible office applications. As of this writing Sun Microsystems the folks who are working on Open Office have started incorporating accessibility to voiceover in there Mac version. This means that the barrier that has stood between working and people going to school and the Mac is going to be eliminated. Finally, we should hope to have accessible office apps by September which is the anticipated release date of this program. It is in beta now and available for download. I would encourage anyone using the Mac with Voiceover to try this beta and offer all the feedback you can. We need to encourage people who are developing for the Mac and especially those who are working on accessibility. I have tried the spreadsheet program and although the coordinates do not speak the tab and shift tab will move from cell to cell as well as up and down arrows. It's got a way to go but this is very promising and it's free. Imagine a free suite of office apps? Wow! So, give it a try and go to www.openoffice.org. Also, on a side note, Tab browsing, safari voiceover and the zone are a wonderful combination. Reading posts on a board has never been easier. Woof,woof!!!!! PS. Spell checking does work on the web in safari..! Try that with Windows and any of the screen readers.....
Hey willie, I have used open office thanks to my main man Jefrey who told me about the 3.0 beta. I have noticed voiceover crashes all the time on my new mac when I run open office. It will read a few things then relaunch so I never actually have used it. When I try to update it, voiceover crashes and relaunches itself. Why is this? This has happened once when reading through my email in apple mail, I was on a subject of an email and voieover just crashed and relaunched. I was thinking that voiceover has the same issue that jaws has with certain words crashing the synth however I don't know waht they are because i can't read them. Do you know of such a thing and how I can work around it. I ahve been windows free for a week now and feel great!
Actually, I have heard of the speech crashing word issue but don't know which words cause this. it is being worked on. Also, I would if you could make note of what exactly crashes office and voiceover and submit it to the office team. This is the first beta and I have no doubt we will be seeing some improvement soon.
Hi,
I think it's just amaazing how far Mac accessibility in general has become.
OpenOffice is cool.
Ya ought to try it in Ubuntu or anything else that can run the Gnome Desktop. It's mostly accesible sing Orca.
Jeffrey
I'll use OpenOffice when it comes out of beta, seeing as I really don't like or use beta software unless there's no other choice.
What I do want to know is, in Office 2007, there's a way to setup a document to comply with APA and or MLA formatting.
Is there anyway to do something similar in OpenOffice?
If so, than that's the only thing that's stopping me from switching entirely to the mac, and saying fuck Windows, even XP which is working pretty well on this machine.
If there is a way in the final release, that would be nice, that way even if I don't totally abandon Windows, damn you college...:)
I can at least have a Ubuntu and Windows XP duel boot.
Voiceover generally crashes in open office when I try to use it period. I tried to check for updates but the update screen kept saying busy at me and enver actually could do anything about it.