Re: PSPP and visually handicapped

[John Darrington]

[ Cross Posting to pspp-users@gnu.org and accessibility@gnu.org ]

PSPP is a GNU project, and GNU takes accessibility for all users
seriously.  For that reason we have an official statement on the matter.
See http://www.gnu.org/accessibility/

Pspp or at least the graphical interface to it "PSPPIRE" uses Gtk+ which
in turn uses the Atk library so that inter-operability with screenreaders
and the like should work.

Last time I tried it (which admittedly was a while ago) Psppire seemed to
work OK with the standard Gnome screenreader "Orca".

Having said that, so far as I'm aware, there has never been any formal or
systematic tests for accessibility in PSPP or PSPPIRE.   So I'd be happy
to work with anyone who has the expertise to conduct such an audit and
make improvements where necessary.

Ben mentioned that the system you are using can only work on Microsoft
Windows.   Can I ask you to try a free platform such as Gnome.   I know
that Gnome has very many tools for visually impaired people.    We try to
make PSPP work with as many systems as possible, but since it is non-free,
Microsoft Windows comes low on our list of priorities.


J'



On Mon, Nov 02, 2020 at 01:30:20PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     Hi! I'm one of the developers of PSPP.
     
     Your message was BCCed to pspp-users, which is a good place to discuss
     PSPP. It was also sent to maintainers@gnu.org, which is not a good
     place to discuss PSPP. I've swapped it around, so that now it is CCed
     to pspp-users and BCCed to maintainers. This should result in the
     right thing happening.
     
     From a look at their website, I see that NVDA is free and open source
     software. As such, I'd be very happy for PSPP to support it, and I'd
     accept contributions to add support. On the other hand, though, it
     runs only on Microsoft Windows. I do not use Windows, and neither do
     any of the other substantial code contributors to PSPP. This makes it
     hard to add support for NVDA and especially to test it. So I think
     that it is unlikely that PSPP will support NVDA soon.
     
     If you find that PSPP does not support screen readers on top of a free
     operating system such as GNU/Linux, please let us know. I believe that
     the GTK+ library that its GUI uses does support accessibility
     interfaces that should allow screen readers to work.
     
     (On any operating system, I imagine that the PSPP support for
     executing syntax files from a command line should work OK for screen
     readers.)
     
     On Mon, Nov 2, 2020 at 1:14 PM Antonín Paleček <palecek.email@seznam.cz> 
wrote:
     >
     > Good morning,
     >      I am visually handicapped, and I tried to use your free statistic 
software PSPP with free “screen reader” NVDA. But, NVDA can not read menu, 
dialogical windows, tables, outputs... Problem is, that PSPP not purveys data 
into NVDA. On the other hand, IBM SPSS works with NVDA without problems, but 
there is problem of high price. Result is, that many visually handicapped 
people from whole world can not work with statistic software.
     > Please, can you try to use PSPP with NVDA? And, is it to possible 
designet new other version of PSPP to that can works with screen readers? For 
example, OpenOffice, MS Office, Skype, IBM SPSS and many other softwares work 
with screen readers without problems. Why PSPP no. Visually handicapped people 
are about 250000000 on world.
     > Please, if that problem will be solved, please can give this information 
to me, and I sent that information to community of visually handicapped.
     > Thank you,
     > Antonín Paleček, Czech Republic, sociologist
     >