Re: Orca notification area and orca

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

On Fri, 2006-07-14 at 10:50 -0400, Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
> > I've been trying
> > to figure out how to navigate to these from the keyboard and I can't get
> > to them.  :-(  
>
> I can't get to the notification bubbles when the appear. It would be
> cool if those were announced/displayed when they appeared.  In the
> meantime....

I think we get some sort of AT-SPI events from this particular
notification bubble.  This bubble doesn't get focus, though, so our
default script will probably not announce it until you move to it.  I
think the app showing it is "update-notifier", though, so one could
potentially write a script to tell it to shout when it's doing something
even if it doesn't have focus.  

Now, the question becomes: even if we get it to shout, what can the user
do?  We've at least let them know something is there, but it's dang
frustrating if you can't use it.  :-(

> Other observations:
>
> 1.  You can navigate to the top panel frame and then arrow or tab over
> to the updates available icon.  Orca announces it as "panel notification
> area embedded component."  It announces the other default objects there
> correctly (i.e. "master", "embedded component <date>", and "log off").
> So you can use Orca with Gnome commands to see if you have updates that
> need installing.  Unfortunately you cannot do a proper right-click on
> the icon.  At least I cannot. When I try, I get the context menu for the
> panel rather than for the update notification icon.  I guess that icon
> doesn't really get focus?

The panels really need work.  There's likely to be things to fix both in
Orca and in gnome-panel.  :-(

Be wary of gnome-panel as well.  There are cases were you can give it
keyboard focus and never be able to leave it without having to use the
mouse, regardless if Orca is running or not.  We need to dig into this a
little more and file a bug against whomever it is that owns it. 

> 1. In cases where:
> a. Orca knows where we are in focus tracking mode (as evidenced by its
> correctly speaking the icons being navigated to)
> b. Gnome thinks otherwise (as evidenced by the context menu for the
> panel rather than the item)
> Would it be possible for flat review to be routed to the location Orca
> just spoke/displayed?

When Orca enters flat review, it tries to start with the context being
the thing that it currently thinks has focus.  If it doesn't have a clue
about this, though, Orca will default to starting at the upper left of
the window.  It may be that Orca just has no clue here.

> 2. Is a graphics/icon dictionary on the list of things to implement at
> some point?  Alternatively, can you convince the appropriate Gnome folks
> to label that icon?  If it were labeled *somewhere* you could reliably
> flat review to it, click on it, and install the updates.

We definitely want to log bugs with the appropriate GNOME folks to get
them to provide labels for their icons.  

> As usual, if I'm being dense/uninformed, just point me at the right
> docs. <smile>

You are not dense.  I think you're doing great stuff and asking great
questions.

Will