Re: [orca-list] Thunderbird 3 accessibility

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Peter:

These are very good questions, and I'd like to try to capture these as 
individual bug reports in Bugzilla so we can better track them.  Some of 
them may indeed be the same as similar Firefox bugs since both Firefox 
and Thunderbird essentially share the same core logic (the Gecko.py script).

> When reading the emails as well as the composition window text 
> punctuation is not expanded when Orca is used in conjunction with 
> speech-dispatcher. This is the same issue as seen in firefox 3. I think 
> it might also be the same issue  what Tomas Cerha fixed a while ago for 
> flat review.

This may indeed be the same concerns we've been discussing today:

Keyboard review punctuation in Firefox
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=520494

Punctuation settings with Speech Dispatcher backend
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=440114

> When selecting the text in the composition window it is not anounced 
> properly.  When using keys home / end to select to the begining / end of 
> a line as well as ctrl with these to select to the top / bottom of the 
> message nothing is spoken. When using other selection keys character / 
> word under the cursor is spoken but the state of the selection is not 
> indicated.Also I guess this might be the same case like with firefox.

I think we have a few bugs related to this, the most relevant is the 
first one:

Text selection is not announced in Firefox
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412100

Orca does not always speak the correct information when navigating 
and/or selecting text across object boundaries in OOo Writer
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=517048

Orca doesn't always speak expected message when selecting all
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=517127

Orca does not provide access to text attributes in Firefox
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=434780

I also remember a navigation issue with Ctrl+Home/End, but I cannot find 
the bug on that one.  :-(

> When browsing up and down over the messagelist I think it would be nice 
> to be able to suppres saying of treeview headers. Actually I am not sure 
> the control in question is really a treeview but Orca indicates it as such.

Can you describe this in more detail?  For example, when you arrow up or 
down, what is currently being presented and what would you prefer be 
presented?

In addition, if Orca's saying it's a treeview, it's probably because 
Thunderbird/Gecko is telling us it's a treeview.  It may be presented 
this was because threaded messages are often represented as trees.

> Finally here is a very crazy thing. I have added my gmail imap account 
> to thunderbird and all my messages got pulled into the inbox folder. 
> This is normal because I have never arranged them via gmail interface. 
> The problem is it makes over 40000 messages in total and arrowing in 
> such a big list of messages is really very slow. it takes up to 10, 15 
> seconds to focus from 1 to the other item. I am just wondering will it 
> be possible to workaround this thing at some point or this is just a 
> really bizzare situation and I should rather avoid it instead of  hoping 
> for the improvement?

Wow.  Yeah...that's a huge list.  Are you able to get a visual 
description of the display when Orca is not running?  I'm curious if 
this might be a general Thunderbird performance problem or if it is 
specific to Orca.

> Sorry for too many issues at once but I am really unsure it is the right 
> time to talk about this in such an early stage of the development. So I 
> have just posted single message instead of flooding the list with 
> seperate messages per issue.

It's OK, and we thank you for bringing these issues up!

Will