Re: [orca-list] Priorities (was Re: Position of state vs. label forcheckboxes (was Re:progress of progress bars is not reported., is it a known thing?))

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi:

> How much can be done by scripts, is it more possible to add new features, 
> rather than make orca more reliable? 

New script writers are always welcome.  There are more applications than
we can handle on our own, and I'd love it if people were able to step up
and contribute.  Plus, scripting can actually be fun.  I wish I could
spend more time on it.  :-)

The issue of reliability is multifaceted.  In a simple way of looking at
our world, bugs can lie in any of the following areas:

1) Orca
2) The AT-SPI infrastructure
3) The GUI toolkit used by the application
4) The application itself
5) Other infrastructure (speech, braille, magnification, etc.)

Unfortunately for us, the Orca team is often deemed responsible for all
failures everywhere, whether it has control over the failures or not.
We realize that's life at the top of the food chain, and we do what we
can to keep thick skins and flameproof clothing.

Many of the problems we run into tend not to be in Orca.  As a matter of
fact, the majority of our days and weekends are spent identifying and
working on bugs.  We work with the appropriate team to convince them it
is a bug in their component and get them to fix it, or we just learn
about the team's code and fix their bugs for them.  We then try to
figure out ways to work around these bugs creatively in Orca.

To be very up front and public about what we are looking at and what we
are aware of, we make intense use of Bugzilla.  In Bugzilla, we keep
track of not only the areas we want to fix/enhance in Orca, but also the
known problems in external things that Orca uses and provides access to.
The known list of bugs and enhancement requests is at
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?query=product%3Aorca.  We also
have a docs/planning.ods spreadsheet in the SVN repository where we
attempt to keep a rough absolute prioritization of these problems.  The
spreadsheet is not always in sync with the bug database, but we try to
update it about once a week.  For more information on the Orca bug
philosophy, see also: http://live.gnome.org/Orca/Bugs.

> Where is a good resource on orca scripting, I don't think there was that 
> much when I started with orca, and if there is still a lack may be docs on 
> that would be useful.

There is a nascent Script Writer's Guide in the Orca documentation set,
which lives in docs/doc-set/orca.html in the SVN repository.  The best
way to learn right now, however, is by looking at existing scripts and
asking questions here.  Becoming intimate with the AT-SPI IDL files is
also very useful because they at least give you some insight into the
AT-SPI object model.

Hope this helps,

Will