Re: [orca-list] Performance enhancements for Firefox 3

[Janina Sajka <janina rednote net>]

Hi,

Are these FF3 enhancements present in Orca 2.4.21? Or only SBN for now?

Also, is the confusion between down-arrow in a combo-box and down-arrow
for content navigation on the agenda for enhancement? Is that an FF
issue?
Also, is the confusion between down-arrow in a combo-box and down-arrow
for content navigation on the agenda for enhancement? Is that an FF
issue? Do I need to explain myself more on this point?

Thanks for all the awesome work. Orca plus FF3 is already a useful tool
for real tasks. I'm certainly excited by the enhancements coming in
2008.

Janina

Joanmarie Diggs writes:
> Hey folks.
> 
> We're in the process of making access to Firefox 3 peppier.  And we're
> doing it in phases rather than as one massive change.  I have just
> committed a couple of patches to trunk which should make life better.  A
> brief bit of background on the changes:  
> 
> When we first implemented support for Firefox 3, there were a number of
> Firefox bugs that made it very difficult to reliably present the
> contents of any given line without laboriously examining it character by
> character.  So we laboriously examine each line character by character
> to be accurate, but the price that gets paid is speed.  We often were
> doing this examination twice too, once for speech and once for braille.
> The end result is that on a page that consists of long lines of text,
> Orca would slow down considerably.  So....
> 
> Change one is to only do the laborious examination once rather than
> twice. <grin>  It should make navigation a bit faster and should not
> come with other side effects.
> 
> Change two is a bit more significant than that.  Thanks to a number of
> fixes made by the Firefox a11y team (thanks guys!), we are now able to
> reliably obtain line contents in a far less laborious way.  The new
> method does things completely and utterly differently.  As such, you'll
> see some changes which are good like an improvement in speed, and items
> that are all on one line (e.g. in a table) being presented as such.
> However, it's hard to anticipate every last condition we'll come across.
> We've tested it, and Michael Whapples saw our work on bug 500016 and
> tested it too -- and he found a couple such conditions which we've since
> fixed.  Thanks Michael!!  Now we need y'all to test it so that we can
> have speedy *and* accurate access in the GNOME 2.22 release.
> 
> If, while testing, you come across an issue and are not sure if it was
> an issue prior to the change, we've added a setting for you.  If you add
> the following lines to your orca-customizations.py file:
> 
> import orca.Gecko
> orca.Gecko.performanceEnhancements = False
> 
> Orca will use the old way of obtaining line contents.  (But it still
> will only do it once rather than twice.) As you might have guessed,  
> 
> orca.Gecko.performanceEnhancements = True 
> 
> will cause the new way to kick in.  (Note that capitalization of True
> and False count.)  The new way is the default way, so if you want to
> throw caution to the wind, you don't have to put anything in
> orca-customizations.py. <smile>
> 
> We look forward to your feedback on these changes and will continue to
> work on additional improvements over the next couple of weeks (including
> form-related problems).
> 
> Thanks everyone!!
> --Joanie
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Orca-list mailing list
> Orca-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca

-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.202.595.7777;	sip:janina a11y org
Partner, Capital Accessibility LLC	http://CapitalAccessibility.Com

Marketing the Owasys 22C talking screenless cell phone in the U.S. and Canada
Learn more at http://ScreenlessPhone.Com

Chair, Open Accessibility	janina a11y org	
Linux Foundation		http://a11y.org