XWord Free - Fantastic Word Processor

Submitted by Blind I Am on 19 August, 2013

Description of App:

XWord free is a free version of the highly acclaimed XWord app. -

XWord can export to PDF, DOC, RTF, RTFD, HTML and support for all images formats - XWord can support the iCloud - Features Perfect page layout 

Free form layout 
Free text layout

Powerful writing tools 

alternate colors option (e.g., white text on blue) 
full screen editing 
find panel allows regular expressions (pattern matching) ● Word processing utilities including word count and automatic page numbering
Automatic save function let you don't have to worry about losing data.
XWord free is able to automatically format bulleted or numbered lists to make your documents crisp and clear.

Version:

1.0

Free or Paid:

Free

Version Of macOS App Was Tested On:

10.8.4

Accessibility Comments:

I tried this after somebody mentioned on one of the mailing lists that it worked well with VoiceOver. Unfortunately, this has not been my experience. Most of the buttons in the app are unlabeled, although there are also 3-4 labeled as 'File' and a similar number labeled 'Edit'. The main control for selecting the font is a text field, where available options are visually displayed as you type. These are not accessible. Of course, many of these functions do have keyboard shortcuts, so most of us would probably be using these anyway. I did test the app to see how accessible it was with tables - creating a new one worked fine. However, there was no feedback from VoiceOver to tell me that a table was present on the page or where the cursor was located in the table. At this point I stopped testing, as the app was clearly going to offer me nothing over TextEdit, Nisus or even Pages.

Usability:

There are some accessibility issues with this app, but it can still be used if you are willing to tolerate these issues and learn how to work around them.