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Is LibreOffice ever going to behave and stop freezing whenever you do nvda+down arrow? Seriously. I installed it again on my new windows installation and quite rapidly remembered why it was I wanted ms word instead...

I can't even read a document without having to manually do it. Pathetic that it is still like this in 2024.

#accessibility #blind #epic #fail #LibreOffice

André Polykanine reshared this.

in reply to Winter blue tardis🇧🇬🇭🇺

@tardis I haven't ever tried it. I heard there was some friction with LO and the team kind of split in two, and now the OpenOffice folks are apparently left trying to rewrite an entire codebase or something, at least they spent like 2 years refactoring after the fork. Not sure what things are like by now.
in reply to Casey Reeves

I installed it on someone's computer, they haven't complained, so, don't know.
in reply to Casey Reeves

All of those "De-googlin" and "de-microsofting" solutions preach about evil corporations that will eat our bodies and suck our souls, how good and cool they are, but actually they don't give a flying F about accessibility. Maybe "all" is too strong, but lots and lots of them.
in reply to André Polykanine

I mean, I am not a fan of ms, I am even less of a fan of google, and I am glad we don't use the latter at work. Because MS is enough to deal with. the amount of crap it likes installing, is a different thing. Even on a Mac. But at least it works. Not as good as Mac stuff works, but. Meh to all that. Open office is good, I played around with this kid's computer, but honestly, even if you find an ms version, which I have somewhere and could give you, it'll always show the close activation thing and you'd have to close it all the time. Not to mention sometimes it does not want to close and then, well, it dies.
in reply to Winter blue tardis🇧🇬🇭🇺

@tardis OpenOffice and all of this stuff may be considered good until you are up to some serious things, like track changes, comments, complicated formatting, formulae and so on, and so on. I'm talking even from a sighted perspective. Oh, and getting compatible with MS Word with those things is yet another level of madness. I mean, as for accessibility, if you ask MS or Google, they at least are obliged to fix. Maybe not so fast, but eventually. With open-source solutions of that size in most cases you'll get "you need it, you fix it" answer. there are some notable exceptions like @forgejo who are really great people and there are folks that do care about accessibility. But in general… OpenOffice/LibreOffice is bad accessibility-wise, MatterMost (a Slack competitor) is awful, Matrix also (at least I couldn't make it work), and so on, and so forth. You want accessibility, you pay, unfortunately.
in reply to André Polykanine

Meh, yeah, I pay for Mcc lol. I did three years or so ago hahaha. But mine was from a multilinguistic standpoint, and thankfully, I don't work with excel. There are absolutely things even in MS that we can't access, or Google. Also, google sucks but that's just because I never made it work. Slack works okay. Teams is a different topic, it opens as many windows as it can. But these guys suck about privacy, and try to make me use the stupid AI, which I don't want to.
in reply to Winter blue tardis🇧🇬🇭🇺

@tardis @menelion I also realized the ecosystem has changed too much in ms world and you can't even install anything but office 365 anymore. And I don't want office 365. So meh. I think I'm just going to convert this document to txt and too bad for the formatting. Or maybe not even bother anymore. Sigh.

I just wanted to have something that worked. Oh well. I even tried to install office via winget, called microsoft.office, and every time the installer is just spewing, couldn't install. It's not even trying. Hmph.

in reply to Casey Reeves

Bleh, yeah, MS office is no longer good for the average home user, not even for work unless it's a company hat uses 365.
in reply to Winter blue tardis🇧🇬🇭🇺

@tardis @menelion Hmph. Oh well. Too bad for me, I guess. I'm not going to pay a subscription for a product if I use it so little... Besides, I have no money, so I can't pay anyway.

I've looked and looked in the LO bugtracker and just can't wrap my head around this interface and have no clue what to even look for.

in reply to Casey Reeves

@tardis I guess, if you need basic stuff, reinstall WordPad if it's already removed on your system. I won't promise anything, but hopefully I have some better news in coming months for you.
in reply to André Polykanine

@menelion @tardis Huh huh. I think this only got removed in windows 11, or are they planning to also take it out in 10? Probably only the former since 10 is EOL pretty darn soon. yay for me I'm still on 10.
in reply to Casey Reeves

@menelion @tardis Fwiw I tried OpenOffice for the laughs. I couldn't even figure out what it was asking me to import in the file formats thing so I selected what I thought would fit, and it opened a totally unusable interface just saying something like, OpenOffice chart with nvda always saying unknown unknown. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with this, but it is even worse than LO for sure.
in reply to Casey Reeves

@tardis that's what I'm talking about. And if you report this, you most likely will get one of those:
A) "You need it, you fix it, here are contributing guidelines";
B) "We can't reproduce it, send a screencast". Variant: "What is a screen reader? How do you use a computer if you're blind?";
C) "Accessibility is a very important subject, but we have a roadmap with features X, Y,Z, Alpha, Beta and Gamma, and then we'll probably will consider thinking maybe about some kind of accessibility, sort of. Probably maybe".
I am not talking specifically about OpenOffice, I don't know their particular attitude, but unfortunately, being myself an open-source maintainer and advocate, I read and heard those things too many times.