Hi Everyone
Well, I've been playing around with openoffice 3.0 for a bit and here
are some initial observations as regards to accessibility. Note, this
is how it behaves for me, it could conceivably behave differently
particularly in regards to stability for you.
It's not much different from rc4 in this respect, I'm sorry to say.
The spreadsheet accessibility is great, so for those looking for a
free and accessible spreadsheet this just might be what you're looking
for. Other than that, though...
Impress still crashes Voiceover when you move to the right onto the
text area, and doesn't crash it when you move to the left. If you try
to type into a text area with VO enabled, Openoffice itself crashes,
as it does when you try to read beyond your current paragraph. Same as
rc4, and naturally this makes working with presentations dang near
impossible.
Writer doesn't seem to have undergone any improvements either.
Paragraphs are still seen as separate edit fields, causing havoc with
proper text selection unless you turn cursor tracking off and even
then you'd better know exactly how many times you need to select in a
given direction since it won't be accurately reported. Text attributes
are still not exposed with vo+t as they should be, making it a pain to
check your fonts and such as well as your alignment. You can VO up to
the formatting toolbar and take a look there, but it's considerably
slower than pressing vo+t would be. Tables still are not very useable,
you can't interact with them and look at their contents. If you keep
track of where you are you can create a table, but editing it after
that is a royal pain. About the best thing for tables in Openoffice is
that it actually tells you there's a table there.
I haven't played with draw at all yet, so can't comment.
Needless to say I'm more than a bit frustrated, I feel like all the
time I put into reporting these issues to the developers was wasted.
I've been reporting the writer bugs since beta 1, so far it seems like
they care most about the spreadsheet though and are basically leaving
the rest for later.
I'll report if I find anything else noteworthy.
