Re: [orca-list] Firefox3 and sayAll broken with latest trunk update

[Hermann <meinelisten onlinehome de>]

am Mi 05. Mär 2008 um 09:23:48 schrieb Gaijin <gaijin clearwire net>:
> > Isn't this what orca does now? Its still a bit buggy, but for the most part 
> > you can do what you want.
>
>       Not really, in my opinion.  The keystrokes should all be in
> Firefox, or Firefox should be made aware of special assisstive        
> technology requests like "stream document to port xxxx when a certain 
> code is received from an assistive tech device/program.        Without some 
> kind of intercommunications standard, this problem    of which keys 
> which program can use is going to reoccur every       time  some new feature 
> is added.  Screen readers pretty much have the Insert hotkey copy-
> righted and crated, ready for shipping.  Only a word processor would
> need it, so if the key is pressed and released, the keystroke could be
> passed to the word processor without interruption.  I love the hotkey 
> plug-in idea the folks at Mozilla came up with (if I was reading things
> right).  I just think the plug-in idea should be taken  to a deeper
> level and create a unified plug-in for assistive tech that everyone can
> use or ignore.  

OK, that's interesting: A screen reader is a program to read the screen, 
nothing else. But in case of FF (and I think not only in FF), Orca has a 
whole lot more things to do, and that's the problem; hope I've 
understood you.
Since I think it's impossible to write one pluging for every program, 
what about the suggestion to write such an accessibility plugin for FF? 
You can turn it on with one keystroke, and with that very same key you 
quit it. Its purpose is to present the webpage in an accessible manner.
Advantage: Screen reader developers could concentrate on developing the 
capability of their program, so that a lot more programs are accessible 
(see the discussion on R-box and other audio programs).

> My madness is two-fold.  Open source users can more
> easily integrate the technology, while commercial vendors will probably
> just ignore it, leaving Microsoft out of the running, hard-hearted, and
> uncaring of us poor handicapped users.  M$ will get a black eye from
> just being so profit oriented and decentralized.  Even if they implement
> the same tech, it doesn't mean every other Windows software writer will
> too. <snickering>  Linux wins, Microsoft loses.  Makes me all warm and 
> tingly inside, just thinking about it.  

Sorry, but I am in doubt of this. MS created MSAA, and it turns out to 
become a pretty good standard. As an example I want to remind you of the 
2 links I posted yesterday. You will find exactly that plugin you've 
demanded, however for IE only.
As a consequence of MSAA, a lot of programs, and not only MS ones, are 
fairly accessible. A program that uses standard Windows routines, can be 
handled by every decent screen reader.
So I think that MS bashing makes no sense. The task is to compete with 
them, and we cannot do this by always turning everything down, that 
comes from Windows.
Hermann