[orca-list] Skype accessibility

[Zahari Yurukov <zahari yurukov gmail com>]

Hi,
The sirious part is in the second half of this message.
I agree that Skype is proprietary application, even worse - owned by
Microsoft, and I was against it the moment I saw it in the early 2005
cause of it's closed communication protocol, which is the root of all
problems, including the accessibility once (if it wasn't for it, we
would have other, accessible clients), but since my contacts are mostly
there, I'm forced to live with it, so I'm frustrated with it's poor
accessibility, which at least improved in the latest version, but that
was more than an year ago, and since then we haven't heard any good news
from it.
And after that really long sentense, I must say that the most annoying
thing is reading the messages, so I've decided to try to understand
where is the problem, cause we might not live enough to see Microsoft
fixing it, or at least it may not happen in the near future.
So I've tried using that program, which name I have to copy-paste, cause
it's so hard to spell, named accerciser, and I wonder how I would have
find it if I wasn't subscribed to the Orca mailing list.


So, the sirious part comes here:
It looks like Skype is updating the lable on the whole list when you
move through the individual items - that's why we're able to read it
when alt-tabbing and with WhereAmI command.
So I imagine it won't be hard for Orca to automaticly announce this
label when it changes, thus enabling reading of messages with up and
down arrows - this wil be a huge improvement!
I haven't tested it, but I imagine this label will change when one
recieves a new message, in case Skype's "internal focus" on that list
isn't moved somewhere on a previous message. So it could be used for
automatic reading of incoming messages for the current conversation.
Furthermore, if Orca is able to traverse this list, that could be a base
for constructing the list of the last 10 messages.

There are other things I haven't checked yet, but may be worth
mentioning here:
- The character echo - I realize that Skype should provide this, but I
think it is important if Orca could at least temporarily hack around
this, cause sometimes it's very hard to type a message without it. Note
that Orca does announce the selection, which is how I currently
workaround the inaccessible "Send message" area.
- The inaccessible edit fields: is there a way Orca could hack around this?
- Some other fields in Skype's main window, like the one for your buddy
mood (I think there is also a tooltip displaying the mood, when you
point the contact's name with the mouse).

Best wishes,
Zahari