Re: [orca-devel] Hello, I am interested in helping

[Joanmarie Diggs <joanied gnome org>]

Hi Bill.

>   I am a grad student MS in CS and I am interested in developing for
> orca, vinux, ubuntu, gnome, in accessibility and screenreaders.  I was
> talking to the people at the vinux project about making a better PDF
> reader for linux.

Well, as soon as some patches to Evince get reviewed and committed, PDF
documents should be pretty accessible with Orca. See [1][2][3], along
with [4].

> I was hoping someone might help me get a better overview of how Orca
> interfaces with the AT-SPI and uses it.  

In general, we register for accessible events of interest, listen for
those events, and when we get those events we do a bit of a heuristic
song and dance to work out why we got them and what (if anything) is
worth presenting about them.

Because different toolkits have different accessible hierarchies and
emit signals differently, we have toolkit scripts to do some of the
heuristics. Because in many cases users expect Orca to present
information and provide support differently based on the type of
application (e.g. text editor versus chat client), Orca also has custom
application scripts. 

This app and toolkit heuristic song and dance is, of course, far less
than ideal. Therefore we recently had an ATK/AT-SPI "hackfest" in which
many stakeholders came together to work on cross-toolkit standardization
of ATK implementations, along with ways to minimize the need for Orca to
do so much heuristically. The resulting tasks can be found here [5].
You'll notice quite a few are marked "needs assignee." Can we interest
you in any of those? ;-)

Thanks for your interest in Orca and GNOME accessibility! Take care.
--joanie, Orca project lead

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=639932
[2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=638905
[3] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=639403
[4] https://live.gnome.org/Evince/a11y
[5] https://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/ATK/Tasks