[orca-list] Structural Navigation "Flag day"

[Joanmarie Diggs <joanmarie diggs gmail com>]

Hey all.

The bad news is that, yes, I'm afraid we're having another (rather
small) "flag day".  If you don't care about shiny new features but like
to keep Orca running, jump to the section called "*** IMPORTANT ***"

Here's the good news:  We've moved the structural navigation code out of
Gecko and into core Orca functionality.  In addition to cleaning things
up quite a bit, the new, more generalized code should hopefully buy us
several things like the ability to implement structural navigation in
other scripts/for other applications, the ability to expand the
functionality to do things with Structural Navigation Objects other than
just move to them, and the ability to easily add new Structural
Navigation Objects into the mix.   On that last front, there are now
several new Structural Navigation Objects available for Firefox and
Thunderbird:

* Anchors
* Buttons
* Check boxes
* Combo boxes
* Entries
* Paragraphs
* Radio buttons

Paragraphs have been bound to P and Shift+P.  The rest are "unbound,"
which means that they do not have a keystroke associated with them.  You
can bind them on the Key Bindings page of the Orca Preferences dialog
for Firefox and/or Thunderbird.

When choosing your bindings for entries and combo boxes, there's
something worth keeping in mind:  When focus is in a combo box or an
entry, Orca's structural navigation does *not* kick in because it is
assumed that you want to type (if it's an entry) or jump to an item (if
it's a combo box).  That means if you bind entries to E, the first press
will jump you to the next entry and subsequent presses will type e in
that entry.  You have two choices for dealing with this sort of thing:

1. Use E (or some other letter) without any modifiers.  Then, when you
no longer want to be in that entry, use Orca+Right to move to the next
object.  Now that you're just past the entry you were in, you can press
E to move to the entry which comes next.

2. Choose a binding that uses the Orca modifier, such as Orca+E.

*** IMPORTANT ***

1. Two new files were added to Orca.  If you just svn update trunk and
do a (sudo) make install things will break. Do a full install, starting
with the .autogen.sh.

2. If you have a customized number for the largeObjectTextLength, that
setting lives in a new location which means you will need to update your
orca-customizations.py file to reflect that.  It's now:

orca.settings.largeObjectTextLength

Yes, Hermann, I know, and I'm sorry.  I promise we'll do our darnedest
to never, ever move it again. <smile> 

3. If you have customized *anything* structural navigation related
(keybindings or settings) for Firefox or Thunderbird you now have two
Mozilla.py* and/or Thunderbird.py* files in your ~/.orca/app-settings
directory.  Delete them and then re-establish your settings within the
Orca Preferences dialog for Firefox/Thunderbird.

Finally, we've tested the heck out of this, but it's also a huge change.
And while one day I plan to be perfect, today ain't that day, and
tomorrow's not looking much more promising.  <smile> So part of checking
it in now is to give all of you who like life on the bleeding edge the
opportunity to give it a good pounding so that all of the kinks are
worked out by the 2.24 release.

Thanks!
--Joanie