Re: Orca accessable web browser with orca

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis googlemail com>]

Labrador wrote: 

> I like very much the "*some*": please try getting logged into a router 
> with both lynx, elinks or links2, netrik, w3m, edbrowse... 

Mentioning Lynx seems beside the point seeing as the developers have no
intention of adding JavaScript support. What makes my Netgear router web
interface hard to use with ELinks-with-spidermonkey is not the
JavaScript but the frames. A quick test suggests it's not impossible
though.

> then we will for sure better understand why people need FF (and so Orca). 

I'm not really sure who or what you're arguing against. Not only am I in
favour of making Firefox accessible with Orca, but I've tried to make it
easier to install the Fire Vox extension and I've contributed a minor
patch of my own to Orca's Gecko handling. But the Orca and Firefox
experience isn't perfected yet.

> IMHO it's absurd to advise using a console-browser from within Orca as long as it's much 
> easier, faster and efficient to do ctrl+alt+F? to use console apps under
> the console

You may think it's absurd, but as I mentioned some prefer using Orca
with Gnome Terminal to ctrl+alt+F anyway.

> I don't believe elinks will one day be as performant as 
> Mozilla/Firefox/Opera browsers in Js and Flash support. 

JavaScript performance in ELinks itself should be very close to that of
Firefox because ELinks is using SpiderMonkey, Mozilla's own JavaScript
library. Browsers also expose subsets of browser functionality to
JavaScript, varying from browser to browser; ELinks has less equivalent
functionality to expose than most graphical browsers. What ELinks is
currently lacking is real DOM support for use with scripts, but as I
understand it the developers are in the gradual process of adding this.

Technically it is possible to launch the standalone Flash Player from
ELinks to open Flash objects, although it doesn't work very well because
ELinks downloads the Flash file to a temporary directory and runs the
Player on that. But as far as I can tell, Flash support is currently
useless for Orca users except for playing audio, since:

1. Gnash (the GNU Flash project) have neither implemented any of the
ActionScript accessibility classes nor exposed the Gnash plugin to
AT-SPI, the GNOME accessibility framework. The developers are currently
focused on getting video streaming operational. See the Request for
Enhancement I logged with Gnash at:

https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?105660

2. Adobe does not expose Flash functionality to AT-SPI.

3. Adobe does not expose Flash Player plugin functionality to the
Microsoft Active Accessibility framework in Firefox or Opera on Windows,
although they do in Internet Explorer. Until this changes, Adobe support
for Flash accessibility on Linux seems unlikely, I'm sorry to say.

For more details see this thread on the Mozilla accessibility
development list:

http://tinyurl.com/y68flt

> The goals is IMHO to take profit from graphical apps thanks to Orca, 
> and to use graphical browsers since it's worldwide known that their 
> console-counterpart fail in JS, Flash, etc.

Using graphical browsers is a means not an end, surely.

> > There are also patches to make W3M use JavaScript, although they're now
> > at least four years old.

> W3m is quite userunfriendly/blindunfriendly (I'm a real 
> lynx addict and cannot work without "numbered links and form fields" + 
> the "cursor showed".

I'm not sure what you mean by "cursor showed". As for W3M being blind
unfriendly, it is sometimes used with Emacspeak. And when used under
Emacs, there appears to be a link-numberer:

http://emacs-w3m.namazu.org/ml/msg06518.html

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis