I think Orca sucks.

[Tex786]

I do not need speach as i have vision but the magniffier's quality is REALLY bad. I am not saying copy Zoomtext but make it to where the mouse moves around the screen. When I used orca I had this huge mouse int he center of my screen with a smaller mouse (that being my real mouse) moving around.

I do not program but this is what i think about Orca.

Do you think ubuntu will ever come around and fix this? I was just unable to use it due to how strange it was tohave two curcers on the screen at once.

[RCC2k7]

You can change Mouse Tracking to Push. Press Insert+Space for the Preferences window. Click on the Magnifier tab and drop down the combo box for the mouse tracking. The Push setting is closer to what most Windows magnifiers do by default. The unmagnified pointer is still visible though.

If you think Orca's magnifier from Ubuntu 8.04 sucks, try to run a copy of Ubuntu 6.10. The magnifier couldn't even do full screen and there were no keystrokes to control magnification setting. Things have come a long way since then and will get better.

[marktribs]

I do not need speach as i have vision but the magniffier's quality is REALLY bad. I am not saying copy Zoomtext but make it to where the mouse moves around the screen. When I used orca I had this huge mouse int he center of my screen with a smaller mouse (that being my real mouse) moving around.

I do not program but this is what i think about Orca.

Do you think ubuntu will ever come around and fix this? I was just unable to use it due to how strange it was tohave two curcers on the screen at once.

I've recently started playing with Orca and must agree with you that it's more of a frustration than anything else to use. At work I use Zoomtext and, yes, that is the quality those of us with low vision need. The GUI is a rather complicated mess with very sluggish performance on my PC. I'm still trying to figure out how to adjust magnification using either my mouse or keypad. I simply do not understand the documentation on keybindings. I want to be able to turn the program on and off as I so wish. It's way behind Zoomtext and needs vast improvements made for it to offer a user friendly and effective alternative to Windows

[Cabb]

It is true that Orca still doesn't work as well as Zoomtext does, however, as mentioned it has come a long way.
I couldn't resist turning this question around and post something about what's so bad about Zoomtext. Zoomtext accomplishes what it does in a bad way. Ten years ago, some of this probably made more sense than it does today. Okay, so the main issue I have with ZT is its performance. First thing: it disables hardware acceleration, so a lot of the things the GPU should do is done by the CPU. I certainly hope that there is a better way of doing things today. So, what do you do? You go out and buy a CPU with two, four, or even more cores, and what do you find out? You find out that ZT disables all but one core completely, from any application, as long as ZT is running. Sigh...

I hope Orca doesn't do this!

Cab

[leona]

Ohh I'd like to chip in on this one.
I use ZoomText at work, I work with Java applications, and what happens when you work with java, yep the magniciation software tends not to work correctly, now again its improved but I still have 3 applicaitns that it will not work with, yes I have installed the Java Accessbridge, but it still relies on the Developers to actualy put the 'hocks' into the software in the fisrt place, I see the Secion 508 still hasn't made it through to software development yet :( as two of the products I can't use are from ORACLE! So there is my rant on ZT, but having said that I used Dolphin's Lunar before that, and that was Even Worse!

Now back to Orca, I too have been trying to get to grips with it and failed, it freezes, the mouse pointer doesn't actually point in the right place, so when I click on a button, nothing happens becaues the pointer is acutally about 1cm in the other random direction, its very very frustrating. Then I tried the tracking, look good at first bu then in Thunderbird it would just wonder all over the screen and not on the email I was typing. Useless.
Can't someone just port ZT to linux and be done with it! :)
So I've resorted back to increasing the font size & large mouse pointer, not ideal.
There used to be an option years ago, where you could make your desktop larger than your screen, like a virtual desktop, I used this as a hack to make it magnify the screen, sadly this option is now gone. Say a 1024x780 virutal desktop and a 800x600 screen, it kinda worked.
Maybe in Ubunru 10.04 we'll have something usable do you think?

[jonrkc]

I installed a Firefox extension named Glazoom! today; it magnifies either the whole page or a selection you make on the page, and seems to do it well based on my limited use so far. It will also work in the other direction should you want to make things smaller.

I have been unable despite about an hour of trying, to get ANY accessibility under Ubuntu 8.04 to work. I could not even get specific help files. As for Orca, that remains a complete mystery to me as there was no way I could find either to explain it, or to simply get it working to experiment with it.

My vision is good, but I still need magnification sometimes. My hearing is poor. There isn't that much I want to hear on the Web, but sometimes it might be handy to have a screen reader anyway.

The extension I installed gives good results for Firefox. For other applications, as far as I can see there is no accessible (!) solution.

[Poodle Doodle]

Yeah I gave Orca a good go..... every time I tried to open it, it would sort of "start up" but never actually start up at all.

So I set it to start up on boot; and that is where the problems really began.

It started up all right; and I was left with a hugely magnified screen that;

a) Had the cross hairs disassociated from the mouse pointer....

b) The cross hairs for the part never moved - AND

i) Could not be made to move with the mouse; or

ii) directional keys like the < ^ > V arrow keys or any other keys;

iii) Nor would any other keys that one would reasonably assume make the screen zoom in or out happen, do anything - like Shift and + or -, or the mouse scroll wheel;

c) And no key or any combination of keys would actually do anything - Sooooooo

d) I was stuck with a PC that had a default HUGELY magnified little square of the screen - that could not operate;

So I had to become immensely cunning and do a multitude of things to get rid of ORCA - by going through the boot up screen and doing a clever and complex little bit of work to stop Orca switching on at start up, without actually logging in.

And I kind of like to have my computer read things out to me... which is the reason why I installed it.

I'd really hate to be significantly impaired - either visually, physically or cognatively; and to be ending up in the same situation as I did with no help to get around the "Orca block" at start up.

Like I don't know where the programmers heads are at, but I think the lack of SIMPLE controls like DIRECTION, ZOOM IN and OUT; and

The lack of a simple interface to make it read stuff like with RIGHT CLICK "read selection, read page, read entire document" etc., basically makes it a bad program to have and use.

Like I am not into BIG manuals, with lots and lots and lots of queer key combinations and lots of things to remember and or write down or print out and eventually lose or forget etc., before I even use the program.

But the LACK of FUNDAMENTAL CONTROLS is just BOOL SHOOT .

[reneorense]

Hello Everyone...

I myself am a low vision and when in Windows, I use ZoomText, I usually go with 5x as my convinient magnigication screen size, and I also use JAWS or NVDA for screen reading... I even made scripts for JAWS in order to make it work compatibly with ZoomText...

I'm currently using Orca screen reader as my reading tool. And Orca's screen reading has improved a lot compared from its previous version from ubuntu 5.10 (First ubuntu I used). I've been into GNOME desktop ever since Fedora 4, and I find orca from then on a head start for Open Source Accessibility...

Everyone is really not happy with its magnification side though... When it comes to Magnification, color contrast and other display enhancement tools, I go for Beryl from Ubuntu's previous versions and now CompizFusion for later versions... I just had to fix few key binding issues and it works perfectly for me... Just as how I made JAWS work fine with ZoomText in my case...

I still think Orca is doing a great thing on its part of contributing for GNOME's accessibility... They have come a long way and there's a longer way ahead...

8-)

[redhalo79]

As of the new release of Orca with Ubuntu 12.04, it works great. I have switched from Win 7 and Mac OSX to Ubuntu exclusively and have no problems. A full screen mag would be awesome tho as Kmag is not very good

[overdrank]

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