Re: Orca urgent response needed! want some tips for a huge seminar.

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Krishnakant:

> are there any issues with ubiquity when orca is running with orca --
> no-setup command?

The Ubuntu Edgy Eft install with Orca is still a bit on the bleeding
edge, and requires you to do a little extra work:

  http://live.gnome.org/Orca/UbuntuEdgyEft

The good news is that we've been working (and listening) and have
updated things in Orca to hopefully work better in this environment.  At
the same time, work has been contributed by IBM to help solve the
problem where assistive technologies cannot access applications being
run as a different user on the display.  We should hopefully see the
improvements as GNOME 2.17.x and GNOME 2.18 become more widely
available.

> I am most interested in the latest status of open office accessibility.
> I recall that the formatting options like toggling the bold etc.
> buttons is not spoken.  I also remember that the last time I upgraded
> openoffice about 20 days back, there was no change and no font
> information was reported.

Unfortunately, much of this is outside the control of the Orca team.  We
have logged bugs with the OpenOffice team, however, and they are working
away at them.  We hope to see great improvement by their next released.

> secondly do I need to upgrade orca itself?  I have the ubuntu 6.10
> live cd and obviously the orca version on that cd must be older than
> the current?

You can always grab the latest Orca sources from
ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/orca.  I'd like to say that
building/installing it by hand is easy, but that's because I do it 10's
of times a day.  :-)  

To build/install it by hand, you need some extra packages on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install gnome-devel build-essential automake1.9 python2.4-dev 

You then need to unpack the Orca tarball you downloaded, cd into its
directory and then type the following:

./configure --prefix=/usr; make; sudo make install 

Hope this helps!

Will