Over the years, I've downloaded, tried, and discarded Libre Office several times. I do remember last time that they were making noises about beginning to take screen reader accessibility seriously, but holy moley have they upped their game! If any of you have given it a really deep dive, let me know if you've encountered any gotchas. I'm itching to cancel my 365 subscription, since all I use now that I'm not in an enterprise setting is Word and a few hundred unnecessary gigs of OneDrive. Following an afternoon messing with it, here are observations:
- Menus! Good old fashioned menus! The last time MS office was this usable was version 2000 or 2003.
- The navigator is a dream, unlike the Word equivalent. Everything is in an expandable tree view: headings, links, comments, references, you name it. It's like the elements list--the JAWS version, not NVDA, but no read-only browse mode necessary.
- Find and Replace, which is also far more usable than word, allows advanced regexp searches and searching by paragraph styles, so things like next/prev heading level 2.
- Record those sorts of things as macros and bind them to keystrokes, and you've got the equivalent of browse mode without a virtual read-only buffer. I accomplished the same thing in Word, but needed to resort to much more complex coding, because Word's GoTo options aren't as powerful.
- Speaking of coding, you can script macros in Python in addition to Libre's version of BASIC.
- It reports styles, page numbers, and misspelled words, probably using UIA or IA2, so that NVDA now announces them as usual.
- There are so many back-channel hints for screen reader users that it's almost to a fault, particularly since some of the instructions are inaccurate and interfere with hearing the actual form control value.
- Inserting page numbers is as easy as it darn well ought to be. Word has made it one of the most frustrating things in existence.
- I have a manuscript template that needs to start headings on a new page two inches from the top margin. In Word, this required a hack that draws a text box around the heading, which will doubtless break when opened in a different program. In writer, it's not a problem.
- I have .docx set to the default file format. According to Copilot, comments, including author and timestamp, will transfer properly to Word, with a few minor/rare limitations. That's my litinis test.
- It uses the same superior spelling engine as Google. Word used to have a supernaturally good spell check. Somehow, it got a lot worse a few years ago. Others have had the same experience.
- In general, Writer just seems to have intelligent options, is lighter weight, and is way, way more usable than Word has been since Microsoft Office 2000. At least, from what I've gotten out of it thus far. Again, I'm looking for recent counter experiences.
What 365 offers that Libre doesn't: - I don't consider Calc accessible, because it doesn't expose a way for NVDA to assign column and row headers. I haven't tried any of the other apps. - I'd miss the fantastic Microsoft neural voice built into Word for reading aloud. It's even better than what's available for Narrator. - I can have a document in Word open on both my computers at once and have edits sync in realtime via OneDrive. - The Word status bar allows navigation by field and easy customization (Writer's status bar can be read but not navigated).
So far, that's all I can think of. Thunderbird has gotten really good, too, so I'm really looking forward to limiting my Microsoft exposure to the operating system. I've really felt of late that they're at war with keyboard users. Their devs just won't put down the mouse. Or maybe Copilot is writing the scode these days: I can tell you, it does not generate accessible code or promote it until explicitly told to do so.
Comments
Why haven't they made mobile apps?
Hi,
I'll try this out tomorrow, but my main question is why haven't they made mobile apps?
I'm almost always on the go & having mobile versions of the Microsoft Office apps is great, but what about alternatives, like LibreOffice?