Re: Serious accessibility issue in Gnome 2.15.

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi All:

I was finally able to do some testing with this.  I'll confirm that none
of these are Orca bugs.  We do care, however, about the overall
accessibility of the platform.  So, we'll dig into these problems more
and follow up with the appropriate teams.

> > 1.  Focus in gaim seems to be messed up.  I was able to create one account, 
> > a freenode irc account.  But now, after doing that, I can never seem to 
> > bring focus back to the main buddy list window, as for whatever reason, it 
> > doesn't seem to appear in the alt tab order.

My experiences show that GAIM will come up without the buddy list and
you need to press the gaim icon in the panel to show it.  I've tried
various ways to get to the icon from the keyboard, but I cannot seem to
do so (BAD for people who cannot use the mouse).  So...I resorted to
clicking on it, which brings up a menu allowing me to show the buddy
list.

Once I was able to make the buddy list visible, I found that Orca seemed
to do just fine with it.

Note that this seems to be only with GAIM 2.0.0beta versus GAIM 1.5.1.

> > 2.  Very strange things are happening in gnome terminal.  Orca tracks live 
> > events well enough, but if I attempt to use flat review, it's all over the 
> > place.  The read current line command seems to start at the top of the 
> > window, rather than at the last location of the cursor.  Another oddity is 
> > that not all of the window is accessible via flat review.  in other words, 
> > if my screen fills up with data, flat review stops before actually reaching 
> > the last line on the screen.

I found that something broke with gnome-terminal's implementation of
getTextAtOffset: it's giving us very wrong and very incorrect values for
GNOME 2.15.90 versus GNOME 2.14.  As such, it's difficult to know where
text is on the screen as well as getting the text for the line where the
cursor is.  We will dig into this more this week and file a bug with the
appropriate component (gnome-terminal, vte, ...) when we learn more.

> > 3.  Open office writer is completely inaccessible.  Orca won't even read the 
> > menu bar or the help dialog.  If I attempt flat review, all I get is 
> > "panel".

I dug into this some more, and there appears to be some binary
incompatibility between the AT-SPI implementation used by OOo and what
is in GNOME 2.15.90.  We've brought this to the OOo team's attention and
will be following up more with them this week.  Note that this may or
may not be an OOo problem (e.g., it could be an inadvertent AT-SPI
incompatibility).

Thanks!

Will