Re: [orca-list] Firefox3 and sayAll broken with latest trunk update

[Gaijin <gaijin clearwire net>]

On Mon, Mar 03, 2008 at 02:48:36PM -0500, Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
> If I were asked "What is the most important thing that you've learned
> the past year?" my answer would be that web page content can be marked
> up in so many different ways and gets exposed to us by FF in so many
> different ways that "getting everything right" means finding examples of
> all of the possibilities and addressing them.  
:End-Quote:

        Is there some way that Orca can be made to use a kind of virtual
cursor to read the page, navigating the page as it cursors through it?
Might be a nice feature if it could be halted as something is being
read, and findingyour real cursor in the general vacinity of where you
stopped reading.  Would be even nicer if you could start/continue
reading from the cursor as well.  Use a hotkey to go to a spot (like a
header) and then start reading from there, bypassing all the stuff you
can easily bypass if you're sighted.  I think the whole idea is to mimic
the way people actually read/scan documents through the use of hotkeys
to skip things of no interest, and read what does interest you.  I guess
Orca would have to know how the web page is coded then, but I can't see
any other way to accomplish anything without it, unless there is some
kind of virtual cursor that Orca could follow that Firefox couldreport
on.  Firefox would have to support the ability to navigate the entire
document, character by character, from start to finish, supplying extra
info like "this is a header" and "this is an edit field."  Can we file a
class-action lawsuit against Microsoft for pain and suffering for making
the web nearly inaccessible to the handicapped?  It wasn't like this
before they added the ability to monitor and spam the bejesus out of us 
netizens.
        Anyway, if there was an ability to cursor through each displayed
        character in Firefox, reporting field changes under the table to
        the screen reader, then screen readers should, theoretically, be
        able to more easily compose things forquicker and easier
        navigation, so hotkeys can be used to mimic the way that sighted
        users read what is being displayed, skipping, scanning headers,
        and reading things of interest.  Am I making sense?

                                Michael