using Abiword with a screen reader

From: Ryan Shugart (rshugart@cs.du.edu)
Date: Thu May 09 2002 - 03:12:02 EDT

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    Hi all:
            First off, let me appologise in advance if this is a redundant
    question, or one that is already answered somewhere else. However, I
    found absolutely no reference to my particular situation in the FAQ or
    other documentation, so I thought I'd bring it up here and see what other
    users said. Also I am a newcommer to Abiword, so I also apologise if what
    I'm asking is right in front of my nose, so to speak.
            Because I am blind, I need to use a screen reader program in order
    to access a computer. The screen reader translates the onscreen
    information into speech. My computer itself is running Windows XP Home
    Edition. For the most part, I am having no problem using Abiword, but
    there are a few rather glaring issues which make it difficult to use the
    program. As I said, I'm not sure if this is me missing something, or an
    actual bug in the program, so that's why I'm asking.
            Perhaps the biggest issue is caret tracking. This, in fact, makes
    it simply impossible for me to use Abiword for any real work. Basicly, my
    screen reader needs to be able to track where the caret is in order to
    give me proper feedback. In most programs, such as Microsoft Word,
    Wordpad and even Notepad, this is not a problem. However, it cannot find
    the caret in Abiword. It would appear that Abiword does not by default
    use the standard system caret. Is this true, and if so, is there a way to
    change this to make it use the standard system caret?
            The next two issues are related. It is not possible to navigate
    the preferences dialog with the tab key. I can go between the "save"
    "default" "OK" and "cansel" buttons. However, none of the other controls
    in the dialog seem to be accessible from the keyboard. This is rather
    strange, as the rest of Abiword seems to have very good keyboard access,
    so again is there something Ineed to change in order to make the
    preferences dialog work?
    Thanks for your help. If it helps, the specific screen reading solution
    I'm using is Windoweyes from
    http://www.gwmicro.com.
    Ryan

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