Re: Orca Laptop keybindings.

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Wow!  Lots of comments.  Thanks so much for taking the time to write  
these up.

> After a dist-upgrade on debian, I got Orca-setup run for the first  
> time in my life.

Yeah!

> I was pleased to be able to select the speech-dispatcher driver  
> through gnome-speech as that is what i am using with speakup anyway.

Many thanks to the folks at Brailcom for providing the gnome-speech  
driver for speech-dispatcher.  I was able to incorporate this into  
the gnome-speech codebase, but only after the GNOME 2.14 cutoff.

> My first impression of Orca is that it will be relatively easy to  
> use once it is complete.
> I had to search quite a bit for the Orca keys.
> May be there is a short list of keys which I did not find.

The design philosophy behind Orca is that it should follow "normal"  
keyboard focus and you should use the keyboard navigation techniques  
built into the core desktop platform to interact with your  
applications.  Escaping to "flat review mode" and using Orca-specific  
keys is viewed as a fallback mechanism.

As Orca is still early under development, our end-user documentation  
for Orca is currently lacking.  I apologize for the lack of  
keybinding information.  The main escape mechanisms for Orca live on  
the keypad, and the current design is described here:

http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/orca/docs/doc-set/ 
orca.html#GESTURES

It's not all implemented at this point, though.  But, Orca's learn  
mode (press Insert+F1 to enter it and Escape to exit it) will allow  
you press various keys to see what has been incorporated.  When you  
enter learn mode, Orca will speak and braille would would have  
happened and will prevent the keystrokes and braille input gestures  
from being sent on to an application.

> I had speakup running when Orca was running and it seems as if they  
> co-exist well together.

Yeah!  We realize that Orca doesn't own the machine and that people  
often want to move to a virtual console and use their AT's there.  As  
such, our hope with Orca is to try to cooperate well with, and  
perhaps even use existing assistive technologies.

> I am not sure if I am wrong there as I seem to not quite get the  
> response from keys like the plus key for reading more than one line.

Right now, this only works for large multiline text areas rather than  
providing a review of the entire window.

> Should I disable speakup before going into X?

If Speakup and Orca co-exist well, then I'm not sure if it's necessary?

> How well is web browsing suppose to work using fire fox deer park  
> and Orca?

Firefox browsing is under development.  Right now, I'd call it "very  
clunky and not fully usable" with the latest community build of  
Firefox.  We're going to continue to shoot for making Firefox as good  
as it can be for Firefox 2, while also collaborating with IBM to  
provide a much better experience for Firefox 3.

> Which key is the "shut up" key?

Any key at the moment tells Orca to shut up.  :-)  I've noticed a lot  
of people gravitate to the left control key, but any key should do at  
the current time.  We may narrow this as we work on more intelligent  
key and word echo techniques.

Thanks again!

Will