Re: [orca-list] Orca Enhancement work

[hackingKK <hackingkk gmail com>]

On Wednesday 02 June 2010 12:42 PM, Lorenzo Gil Sanchez wrote:
> Well, we also sent a mail announcing we were working on this:
>
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/evince-list/2010-April/msg00002.html
>
> but we sent it to the Evince mailing list since we believe this is a
> problem with the PDF document viewer, not the screen reader.
>
>    
Agreed.  The problem is indeed with the said application.

> > We initially had a lot of analysis/research work to be done to
> > understand what was the quickest and efficient solution to employ to
> > get pdf documents accessible - of all the solutions thus explored we
> > finalised on one to get it implemented. Since this was a research
> > exploration and we were not aware of the feasibility we planned to
> > share it only once we had a working prototype - which is with us
> > today. there is some small fine-tuning left after which we will share
> > the entire work, with source, with all. We would also love to have
> > feedback and comments on the same - it surely helps the development
> > process. Also, we completely go by the open source philosophy.
> >
> >      
> If you want some (useful) feedback the best thing is to show the code.
> Your functional description is fine but I think it's better to have a
> look at the code.
>
>    
+1
This is what I kept on saying.

> We did this by attaching patches to Evince and Poppler bugzillas and I
> can tell those were good decisions since upstream developers told us
> their ideas and corrections about the patches. IRC channels on
> irc.gnome.org are also very useful.
>
>    
Exactly.
> List of such patches:
>
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309015#c48
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309015#c54
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28276
>
>
>    
> > Our efforts make a pdf document open in firefox. So from Orca when a
> > user opens a pdf document (on a key binding) the document opens, as
> > is, in firefox and Orca reads it from there - with this technique, the
> > document formatting appears to be intact, Orca reads the document
> > properly and this method is not restricted to any one particular pdf
> > reader application. We have, at the same time, also enhanced Evince to
> > support the changes that we have done, so if someone wants to open the
> > document with evince then evince opens, but on a key binding the file
> > is opened in Firefox and control passes there.
> >      
> IMHO this looks like a hack. Don't get me wrong, it's probably a working
> solution but it seems to not solve the real problem, just delegates the
> thing to another programm.
>    

Yes, this is a working hack.
Although I gave one test for the team to perform in my previous email.

Gnome has a better accessibility layer and I think working on evince is 
a much better option.
Yet, the solution right now is good in that what we command line geeks 
can do will now be done by even non-technical users.
I have already used pdf2html but as I said, we need to use terminal for 
this.
Happy hacking.
Krishnakant.