Hi Markku,
I am blind user who uses jaws 3.3.1 and who has at the moment no possibility to upgrade and can use OO 1.0 somehow, but not OO 1.1 at all. Menu shows up ok, but the text shows not at all. When I asked here about the thing, it was explained to me, but at the same time I understood that developers have no intention to do a thing to restore the earlier state or do something so that it would work. I want to use newest software, but with my old jaws and windows 98 it is sometimes hard.
In order to more faithfully render text and graphics across multiple platforms, and to make use of the features of TrueType and Adobe fonts, and for probably a host of other reasons, a shift was made some time ago to have OOo render text itself. Specifically that means it is not using the video driver and OS text rendering calls on Windows to do this, which is what the older version of JAWS relied on to build an off-screen model and read the contents of the screen.
OOo is not the first program to make this change - text rendered by many Java applications are another. In order to have a general mechanism for exposing this text to assistive technologies, while at the same time giving application programmers full flexibility in how they choose to render text, Sun pioneered the use of a rich accessibility programming interface for communicating this information. OOo now uses this, as do the more recent versions of JAWS.
In fact there is an industry change toward this. Sun is now shipping in Solaris 10 the open source GNOME Accessibility architecture that is was the main developer of - and which is used by OpenOffice.org when running on Solaris or GNU/Linux or other UNIX environments. The Apple Macintosh OS starting in I believe version 10.2 has an accessibility API which is how their forthcoming VoiceOver screen reader provides access to that environment. And Microsoft has stated that they will have a similar architecture in Longhorn.
I'm sorry that it is not possible for you continue to use the latest software tools with your older copy of JAWS. One of the main incentives for the developers of these accessibility architectures was to get away from the need to always upgrade AT whenever the OS or applications change - to have a clean accessibility interface that continued to work through such changes.
Regards,
Peter Korn Sun Accessibility team
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