Re: setting up orca

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi All:

> > I don't know if it is only one model of laptop which gives access to  
> > Orca, whether
> > the user had an extended keypad for his laptop or was able  to access 
> > flat review
> > mode or other Orca commands by using the FN key  that comes with most 
> > laptops but
> > could anyone possibly tell me if Orca  would be a more viable 
> > alternative for me?

Toshiba laptops are generally pretty nice in that the FN acts like a
shift key to enable keypad keys.  For example when I press FN+u on my
Toshiba Tecra M2, I get KP_4.  I think some other laptops tend to
require a bit more user action in that you need to toggle keypad access
mode. 

> Laptops are becoming the new standard though so we need to think about 
> how we can support it by default. My guess would be that the Orca team 
> has been thinking about this already.

Orca currently has latent support to allow you to augment and override
its keybindings, but we've not really documented it, and I don't
necessarily want to document it because I'm not sure I like it.  :-)

After meeting with some wonderful folks associated with ONCE in Spain
the last week of June, we're looking into a way to allow people to
completely replace the keybindings for Orca with a set of their own.
This can help lead to sets of keybindings maybe more appropriate to
given locales and perhaps for bindings such as JAWS-like bindings if
people were so inclined (though Orca is *not* intended to be a JAWS
clone).

I hope to have the functionality done in code for Orca V1.0 for the
GNOME 2.16 release, but we may need to push complete configuration
support in the configuration GUI until post GNOME 2.16.  In the interim,
you may need to hand edit a configuration file or two.

Will