Re: [SEC508] Opera and Screen Readers

[Kelly Ford <Kelly@kellford.com>]

Don,

I tried the beta of Opera 8.0 a couple days ago with the latest released 
versions of JAWS and Window-Eyes.  I don't know how you'd define the term 
work but I had what I'd call mixed results.  I was using JAWS 6.0 and 
Window-Eyes 5.0 Beta 1.

I was able to get around the web and Opera using the screen review 
functions of both JAWS and Window-Eyes.  Depending on the layout of the web 
page this meant a range of results from no big impact to having to sort out 
multi-columned web pages.  You do not get any of the automatic 
decolumnization of tables, which is what helps a lot in reading, as you do 
with the way these programs interact with IE.

Also, many of the opera controls appeared as the same window type and class 
to both screen readers.  This was somewhat problematic when setting 
preferences as I couldn't tell what were check boxes, radio buttons and 
such.  Experimentation and labelling of graphics with the screen reader's 
graphic dictionary functions helped a lot here.

With respect to reading web pages I had the best automatic reading results 
when I set the screen readers to their a read all mode and then paged 
through a web page text.  Interestingly JAWS read the link text with focus 
as I used "a" and "q" to move through links on the page while Window-Eyes 
didn't.

I also tried out some of the Opera voice input and output commands in the 
beta.  The help talks about some sort of a display telling you if the 
commands you say are recognized.  I wasn't able to locate this but in 
general the commands worked well.  That said I had conflicts when trying to 
have Opera read web pages with a screen reader running.  I didn't 
experiment too much in this space since I had better results when I 
unloaded the screen reader but obviously that made using the computer in 
general more problematic.

Kelly
At 09:30 AM 12/25/2004, you wrote:

> Has anyone gotten Opera to work with screen readers?  I know there has 
> been some discussion on this before, but it's been so long ago.  Thanks.
>
> Don
>
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