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

["Grussenmeyer, William Daniel" <wdg22 saclink csus edu>]

Hello Joanie,
   I'd like to help on any of those projects.  I'd also like to check out the new evince.  But I do not know how to use your development tools, even after reading how to get started on the webpage.  I downloaded the 3.1.2 evince source with git, as the website says (I first tried to get the package but I do not know how to untar a tar.xz file and googling it was not helpful).  After I got the source and the new poppler .16 using git also, I do not know what to do from there.  Typing 'make" did nothing.  I noticed a makefile.am and looked this up, which I guess is part of a program called automake.  Well then I tried automake, autoreconf, autoreconf --install, and some other commands, but all I got was errors.  I've spent three or four hours messing around with this, and I've had about enough.  Maybe the automake program is not configured correctly as I did not ever use it before on my ubuntu 10.04 virtual machine.  And that is the other thing, I'm using ubuntu 10.04 and I do not know if this will work using the standard website instructions.  What environment or operating system do you guys use?  I need to use something that is easy to get orca or speakup or both working in it.
Thanks,
Bill

________________________________________
From: Joanmarie Diggs [joanmarie diggs gmail com] On Behalf Of Joanmarie Diggs [joanied gnome org]
Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2011 9:49 AM
To: Grussenmeyer, William Daniel
Cc: orca-devel-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-devel] Hello, I am interested in helping

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