[orca-list] Reporting bugs upstream (was Re: pidgin 2.6.4 and orca)

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Steve:

> I may have brought this up before but not sure.  When bringing up
> these accessibility issues to upstream developers, what is the best
> thing to tell them to get them headed in the right direction?  What I
> mean is you can go up to someone and suggest they make their
> application "more accessible" and you might try and explain what Orca
> does but really, what facts can we give them to really get them
> going.  How does an app developer properly talk to at-spi for example?

One thing to do is to approach this from the user standpoint.

"I had my friend/wife/husband/son/daughter/cousin/etc. look at the 
screen for me.  There is this component that has a drawing of a 
flashlight on it and it appears to be the only way to open the search 
dialog.  Since the component doesn't seem to accept keyboard focus, it 
seems as though the only way for someone to do a search is to use the 
mouse to click on the flashlight.  I'm not able to position the mouse 
over the flashlight, so I cannot click on it.  I *can*, however, use 
the keyboard.

Please provide a method to open the search dialog from the keyboard.  
One way to do this might be to make the flashlight object keyboard 
traversable.  If you do that, it would be great, but you should also 
make sure to provide a textual equivalent for the flashlight icon so 
that users with visual impairments can use assistive technologies such 
as orca to have the object presented to them in speech and/or braille.  
You can find more information about this in the GNOME Accessibility 
Developer's Guide at 
http://library.gnome.org/devel/accessibility-devel-guide/nightly/.  If 
you have any questions, please also feel free to ask on the 
gnome-accessibility-list mailing list."

Will