Re: [orca-list] GNOME Weather applet?

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

> First of all, thanks a lot for this nice example.  This is great
> for starting me of with customisations.  Since I primarily use
> braille, the actual functionality implemented by this example
> is not that useful to me though.  

import orca.braille
...
    orca.braille.displayMessage(message)
...

Coming in the future to braille may be some sort of "display message
with timeout" feature.  This would allow a message to display for a
period of time and then return to displaying the current object with
focus.  It's an idea I've resisted for a while, but Mike keeps wearing
me down on the subject.  It's just an idea right now, though.

> Let me rephrase my question:  Is there
> a way to programmatically replace the accessible name
> of a certain object on the desktop in Orca?  With this, I could replace
> "GNOME Wather" (which is currently displayed in braille and spoken
> when I cycle through the panel applets) with some custom
> created string.

Aha!  I see now.  I'm not sure about this - I've never really tried
modifying the name attribute of an accessible object from an assistive
technology.  If you wanted to hack a little bit, you might try
explicitly setting obj.name, where obj is the Python accessible that you
somehow magically discovered.  This would modify Orca's local cache of
the name. 

> I could then factor the temperature into
> that and therefore fix up the accessibility of the applet, without
> having to hack the applet code itself.

Joanie's done some work today in this area, though it may not solve
everything you are trying to do:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435577

> working, I guess I am just trying to learn how to script things
> in Orca, and this seems like a sufficiently simple example to start with.

Unfortunately, gnome-panel and the applets are fraught with issues.  :-(
You might be better starting with a standalone application.  Pick one
and we can help you get going, especially if it will help turn you into
an overall script writer.  :-)  If that app leads to a dead end (i.e.,
the app has many a11y issues that we cannot solve with scripting), pick
another and we'll start again.

Will