Re: Orca a few things regarding orca + firefox 3 in feisty

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Hermann:

> regarding the headings problem:
> It seems not to be a Feisty issue, it also happens in FF 3 under Edgy;
> even worse: I must tab through teh Heise start page to find any
> headings. This also happens on other pages, for example in the news
> feeds of the Frankfurter Rundschau:
> http://www.f-r.de/rss/nachrichten/index.xml
>   

I took a look at this page and was able to navigate around in an 
expected way, using FF3 from March 1 and  Orca from svn trunk.  I might 
be missing something, though.

Can you describe more about what your experience is with this page?  For 
example, what keys are you typing, what's the bad behavior you are 
seeing, and what good behavior do you expect?

> Regarding the Orca cursor mode: It acts as if the caret browsing is
> turned on, I can't see any difference, so why was it implemented? You
>   

Firefox's built-in caret navigation is unreliable on many pages.  I 
don't like the fact that it is this way, and have continually voiced my 
opinion rather strongly with the Firefox folks in public e-mail, private 
e-mail, and bug reports.  The good news is that I think they care and 
are starting to pay attention.  The bad news is that I don't see things 
being fixed appropriately any time soon.  It's unfortunate and I'm not 
happy about the situation for many reasons.

As a result, we are forced to try to do something in Orca to remedy the 
problem.  Because we need to query the document model remotely via the 
AT-SPI, we are going to have a performance hit.

Keep in mind that we classify navigation in two ways:  caret navigation 
and structural navigation. 

In it's simplest form, caret navigation is where you use the arrow keys 
to move around text.  It's a relatively localized form of navigation and 
doesn't really require any knowledge of the type of content in the 
page.  Firefox's implementation of this has issues, so we need to 
provide our own.

Structural navigation has some knowledge of the content, and allows you 
to navigate in bigger logical chunks than caret navigation.  For 
example, Firefox has support for the "Tab" key to let you jump between 
text areas, links, form controls, etc.  Orca extends this to provide the 
ability to jump between headers, logical chunks, etc.

> Two slightly differences in behavior I noticed on the news feeds of the
> "Rundschau":
> 1: The gecko controlled cursor identifies headings, while the Orca
> cursor doesn't; however you can jump from heading to heading, but they
> are not announced.
>   

I just tried this with Orca from svn trunk and FF3 from March 1 and 
didn't see the same problems.  :-(  Which versions of Orca and FF3 are 
you using?  They're both kind of a moving target these days because 
we're all working hard on trying to improve the user experience.

Thanks for all your comments and questions, by the way.  They really help!

Will