Orca Status of Firefox (Re: "HTML-Container" is driving me crazy!)

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Hermann:

In short, the answer to your questions is that we obviously do not want
the user experience you are currently getting.  Getting to the desired
user experience is going to be a long road.  

The accessibility implementation inside Firefox 3 is being completely
rewritten, and it is being done in a way such that its model is
different from what we get from other toolkits, such as GTK+, Open
Office, and Java.  The net result of this is that the 'default' script
for Orca that works well with GTK+, OOo, and Java doesn't always work so
well with Firefox and we need to start from scratch a lot of the time.
There's no major blame here - some of the differences are due to the
drastic differences between web content and standard GUI content.

In addition, caret navigation in Firefox 3 is woefully inadequate and
the Firefox team has no plans to fix it.  I've been trying to get them
to fix it since Firefox 2.  Believe me, I've tried.  I'm also still
trying.  The result of their ability to provide a good navigation
experience is that we need to write our own navigation code in Orca.
This is a complex undertaking and is what is consuming well over 90% of
the time we spend on Firefox.  While I am a bit disconcerted by this,
the Firefox team is indeed still spending their time on other areas for
accessibility, and we need to be thankful for that.

Finally, the geographic distance between the Orca and Firefox teams is
rather large (US and China) - this makes interactive communication
difficult, especially when it comes to needing fast turn around on bugs
in the accessibility implementation in Firefox.

Having said all that, both teams are committed and we are taking one
step at a time.  

Will

On Thu, 2006-12-21 at 17:58 +0100, Hermann wrote:
> Hi,
> why does Orca always report "HTML-Container"? It happens again and again 
> when scrolling a webpage.
> It seems as if this happens when I enter a new portion of the page, perhaps 
> a paragraph.
> Is this really necessary, and is there a way to turn it off?
> Btw.: Why does Orca repeat links and their context several times, partially 
> with a low voice? That low voice indicates a link, but this should be 
> sufficient information, why that redundancy?
> Regards
> Hermann
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