I have had another go at installing Libre Office under Yosemite today to see if accessibility had improved. .
I have only had time so far to look at the Writer word-processing part of the app. Whilst there are some improvements compared to the last time I tried the suite under Mavericks there still seems a lot of difficulties which make the application frustrating to use. On the plus side I can at least now get typing echo from the edit areas, possibly as a result of my installing 2 versions of Java, both a legacy Java 6 and the latest Java 7 or 8. This I did not achieve with Mavericks where there was no typing echo. However the app has unacceptable high levels of chatter which can be ameliorated slightly by putting Voiceover into low verbosity. Even with low verbosity the app announces insertion point at beginning of text every time you enter a paragraph, or insertion point at end of text if you are using option down arrow. If you have medium verbosity it also announces edit text. if you simply cursor down the app announces exactly where the cursor insertion point is, e.g. on word too after O. This may be good for editing but does not make for a smooth reading experience of text. However you could conceivably just use Writer for editing text and use TextEdit for reading text generally for content I suppose. . However the main problem is that it still seems impossible to effectively interact with anything else but a paragraph at a time. I found that by pressing VO A a paragraph would read acceptably but then grind to a halt. A push of the down arrow would then allow you to press VO A again to read the next paragraph. Of course every time you push the down arrow this will provoke an edit text insertion point at beginning of text message from Voiceover.` Disappointingly There appears no way to read a whole page or document in Writer. The best and smoothest way for proceeding through a document was to press VO a and then press down arrow to allow a further VO A. I was able to jump to the top and bottom of the document by pressing command down and up arrow but could not find a reliable way of navigating by page. Like TextEdit Libre Office appeared to offer little to Voiceover users with reading Tables and Pages appears the only supported application for this at the moment on the word Processing front. I experimented with turning off print view and web view but this did not seem to greatly improve matters. The preferences on my system were ineffectively inaccessible as VO kept on resetting itself as I tried to enter and explore these and eventually I had to force quit Libre Office and hold down the power button to restart my iMac. I found little that I could not do more easily in TextEdit but these initial observations may be too harsh if there are strategies for coping with the app which I am not aware of. i would be interested to hear if anybody else has more positive experience. David Griffith . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
