Re: [orca-list] Orca Enhancement work



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.


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