Re: [orca-list] Orca Enhancement work

[Lorenzo Gil Sanchez <lgs yaco es>]

El mié, 02-06-2010 a las 11:44 +0530, leena chourey escribió:
> Dear all,
> 
> Thank you for your quick responses - it is nice to receive all of
> these. We had started on this work a couple of months back and before
> starting, as is our usual practice, we had informed in all the lists
> about starting on this work

Do you mean this email?:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2010-April/msg00193.html


>  -  this was primarily so that our efforts do not get duplicated. At
> that time, though this thread had sufficient interest, no one had got
> into actual implementation. Hence we started it. Not sure how anyone
> has missed on this and started work on this thread?

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.

> 
> 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.

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.

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.

I've been told that in the Windows platform JAWS is full of such hacks
since there is no accesibility layer or at least no layer as good as we
have in GNOME. So every problem needs a special treatment in JAWS. We
try to avoid this pattern in GNOME and always try to do the right(tm)
thing.

Best regards,

Lorenzo Gil