Gnopernicus under 2.8, and thoughts

["Nolan J. Darilek" <nolan thewordnerd info>]

Once again I'm playing with the GNOME accessibility software, and I'm
having issues. Today I snagged lots of GNOME 2.8 from Debian
unstable. I didn't do a dist-upgrade, so it's possible that there are
bits of 2.6 lingering, but if there are then I'm not aware of
them. I'm having major issues reviewing the screen,
though. Specifically, flat review mode might work, or it might
not. Sometimes I can enter flat review mode and review a portion of
the screen, then gnopernicus switches to focus-tracking mode without
my having asked it to do so. Sometimes I can't enter review mode
because Gnopernicus instantly switches back to focus-tracking. It's
the same in layer 0. I'll hit a boundary, moving too high or too far
to the right and,, instead of announcing "no next," gnopernicus
instantly moves the review focus back to where I began.

I'm not sure if this is a bug, or if it's due to an outdated
library. Again, I'm running GNOME 2.8. Gnopernicus is a CVS checkout
as of this morning, though I've also experienced this issue with
0.84. I also have the latest CVS checkout of at-spi, as login-helper
isn't included in the version packaged with Debian.

Is this a gnopernicus bug, or is it likely caused by having an older
version of some library which I'm not aware of not having upgraded?

Also, I have a question about the future of GNOME accessibility and
Gnopernicus. I was off-list for a few months and, upon browsing
through recent archives, noticed discussion about Gnopernicus, Orca
and scripting. Specifically, someone was asking if scripting would be
included in Gnopernicus.

Out of curiosity, is this in Gnopernicus' future, or is Orca intended
to become a fully-functional, competing screen reader? I was under the
impression that Orca was intended as a test to explore how scripting
accessibility might work in Python, but are there plans to make it
more?

I think that scripted accessibility is an excellent idea and an
important feature. I wonder, though, if final products should/will be
scripting language agnostic, thus allowing me to script in Python,
Ruby, Perl or whichever language I might choose?

Just some thoughts. I realize that the realization of these ideas is
still far off, but I thought I'd ask and toss them out regardless.