I haven't really used an office suite since going blind(which happened
in 2012), but I switched from MS Office to OpenOffice long before I
switched from Windows to Linux, and even when I could see, I
absolutely hated MS Office 2007 and 2010. Can't personally comment on
LibreOffice with either Orca under Linux or NVDA under Windows, but
the last time I had reason to use a Windows, I found using Firefox
with NVDA almost identical to using Firefox with Orca.
That said, while I've been using Linux full-time on my personal
computers since late 2005 or early 2006, I do pretty much everything
that isn't done in a web browser from the command line, and would
probably ditch the GUI altogether if I could find a text-mode web
browser I thought anywhere near as usable as Firefox is with Orca.
Sadly, as much as I think most web designers abuse JavaScript and
other rich web content, there are too many websites that depend on
such, most text-only web browsers either lack support for JavaScript
altogether or only have limited support, the navigational hotkeys
provided by Orca, NVDA, and JAWS are so darn useful I wonder how
sighted me got by without them, and a text-mode web browser preserving
the visual layout of web pages with multiple columns doesn't work too
well with how text-mode screen readers tend to work... and that's not
even getting into how text-mode web browsers tend to have key bindings
that seem completely alien to someone coming from a GUI browser.
If my programming skills were up to the task of writing a text-mode
web browser or adding new features to an existing one, some of the
items on my personal wish list would be:
-Firefox-like keybindings
-Orca-like navigational hotkeys.
--Display web pages in a single-column format by default.
-keyboard shortcut to switch between browse and focus mode.
-Focused web elements stretch to fill the screen's width, padding with
whitespace if needed.
-Focused web elements have a type identifier added to their text.
-Full support for functional aspects of JavaScript and HTML5 while
generally ignoring eyecandy aspects.
-Keyboard shortcut to toggle JavaScript on/off on the current page,
refreshing if applicable.
-Attempt to force all JavaScript et. al. clickables and form elements
to be tab focusable and to respond to spacebar or enter as they would
to a mouse click.
-Basically, build into the browser itself, many of the accessibility
featuresOrca provides through being able to communicate with what
graphical browsers are doing behind the scenes that a text-mode screen
reader can't due to only being able to see what's printed to the
terminal screen.
As for Gnome versus Mate, while I don't use either, they're generally
considered to be the two desktop environments that are most compatible
with Orca, and which is better is ultimately as much personal
preference for blind people as it is for sighted people. That said,
it's my understanding that Orca generally works well with most
applications that use GTK 2 or 3 while QT apps are generally much less
compatible(and thus, KDE isn't recommended for blind use)... I have
read some concerns that Wayland and GTK4 might break compatibility
with Orca as they become more widespread, but I don't know enough to
know how worried one should be about such developments.
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