Re: Orca great news for orca developers!

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

> the great news is that I have managed to convince the national
> Association for the Blind (NAB) to setup a complete linux lab with
> orca as the main screen reader and emacspeak for internet surffing.

Wow!  

> infact we are also training people on python specially to script orca!.

Double wow!

> how far is open office accessible with orca?  I am interested to know
> if orca is fine with the word processor and does orca anounce the font
> attributes like bold etc.  if I press ctrl-b or ctrl-i will it anounce
> the toggling of bold on or italics on.

We've been looking into this and have a tracking bug in Orca:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=363830

This bug is basically to remind us to track the ultimate source of the
problem (OpenOffice).  

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=70872

The OpenOffice folks are definitely aware of it, but I encourage you to
vote for any/all of the OpenOffice bugs that affect Orca's access to
OpenOffice.  :-)  

By the way, we try to keep a list of bugs in non-GNOME components that
we care about here:

http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/orca/bugs/bugs.html

We also try to keep a complete list of known problems and feature
requests in the Orca bug list, and use the convention of manually
prefixing the summary with "[blocked]" if it is something we cannot
control or work around:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?query=product%3Aorca

Any bug marked as "[blocked]" also contains a pointer the ultimate
source of the problem.  You'll see that 46 of the 99 Orca bugs/rfes are
blocked.  :-(  We don't drop the ball there, though, and will continue
to try to work with others to resolve these problems.

You'll also see that 30 of the 99 bugs are actually feature requests.  7
of the feature requests are also blocked, leaving us with 30 bugs.  We
constantly analyze the list and are working on things as fast as we can.

> how is the spreadsheet working?

It's coming along pretty well.  From your mail, however, I'm guessing
you're running into some problems.  What are you finding?

> I also want to know as to how I get started in scripting orca for
> specific applications?

The script writing guide is available here, though it is a little out of
date (sorry):

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

It's still worth a read to get the overall idea of what we're trying to
do.  I'd then suggest taking a look at any of the custom scripts we've
been working on.  They live in src/orca/scripts/*.py.

Thanks for your support, and keep asking questions.  :-)

Will