Re: [orca-list] Performance enhancements for Firefox 3

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

By the way, everyone, in case you don't realize it: JOANIE IS AN AWESOME 
ORCA DEVELOPER!

Will

Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
> Hey folks.
>
> We're in the process of making access to Firefox 3 peppier.  And we're
> doing it in phases rather than as one massive change.  I have just
> committed a couple of patches to trunk which should make life better.  A
> brief bit of background on the changes:  
>
> When we first implemented support for Firefox 3, there were a number of
> Firefox bugs that made it very difficult to reliably present the
> contents of any given line without laboriously examining it character by
> character.  So we laboriously examine each line character by character
> to be accurate, but the price that gets paid is speed.  We often were
> doing this examination twice too, once for speech and once for braille.
> The end result is that on a page that consists of long lines of text,
> Orca would slow down considerably.  So....
>
> Change one is to only do the laborious examination once rather than
> twice. <grin>  It should make navigation a bit faster and should not
> come with other side effects.
>
> Change two is a bit more significant than that.  Thanks to a number of
> fixes made by the Firefox a11y team (thanks guys!), we are now able to
> reliably obtain line contents in a far less laborious way.  The new
> method does things completely and utterly differently.  As such, you'll
> see some changes which are good like an improvement in speed, and items
> that are all on one line (e.g. in a table) being presented as such.
> However, it's hard to anticipate every last condition we'll come across.
> We've tested it, and Michael Whapples saw our work on bug 500016 and
> tested it too -- and he found a couple such conditions which we've since
> fixed.  Thanks Michael!!  Now we need y'all to test it so that we can
> have speedy *and* accurate access in the GNOME 2.22 release.
>
> If, while testing, you come across an issue and are not sure if it was
> an issue prior to the change, we've added a setting for you.  If you add
> the following lines to your orca-customizations.py file:
>
> import orca.Gecko
> orca.Gecko.performanceEnhancements = False
>
> Orca will use the old way of obtaining line contents.  (But it still
> will only do it once rather than twice.) As you might have guessed,  
>
> orca.Gecko.performanceEnhancements = True 
>
> will cause the new way to kick in.  (Note that capitalization of True
> and False count.)  The new way is the default way, so if you want to
> throw caution to the wind, you don't have to put anything in
> orca-customizations.py. <smile>
>
> We look forward to your feedback on these changes and will continue to
> work on additional improvements over the next couple of weeks (including
> form-related problems).
>
> Thanks everyone!!
> --Joanie
>
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