[orca-list] Orca and Radio New Zealand web site

[Rob Hill <robhill es co nz>]

Hello list, 

The webmaster at Radio New Zealand has offered to put a link on each
page leading to tips for using various screenreaders with the Radio NZ
web site.  He asked, via the NZ Foundation for the Blind assistive
technology mailing list, for contributions, and I offered to do this
for Orca, since I think it's a great idea.  So I've had a go.  Now, I
normally use emacspeak and emacs-w3m to browse the web, using firefox
and orca only when necessary because of javascript etc, so my
familiarity with Orca isn't thorough.  So if anyone feels moved to
comment on what I've written, or offer improvements or corrections, I'd really
appreciate it.  You may not need to look at the site itself, but if
you want to, the URL is:

www.radionz.co.nz

Any feedback appreciated. 

Rob

My attempt follows:

Tips for Navigating the Radio NZ Web Site Using Orca and Firefox on Linux Systems 

If you've got this far, then you must have at least some basic familiarity with the use of Firefox via Orca.  
Some tips which may help, however, are:

* Orca starts to work well with Firefox 3.0, so if you have an earlier version of Firefox, consider 
upgrading. 

* As in all web pages, you can tab through the links, press enter to follow them, and read the site using the 
arrow keys. 

* It is quicker to use short-cut keys to move to headings.  Pressing  <1> moves to the first heading at level 
1.  Pressing <1> again moves  to the second heading at level 1, and so on.  The same is true for  pressing 
keys <2> through <6>, for moving to headings of level 2  through 6. 

* The main content of all pages starts at heading level 2, so pressing  <2> takes you there.  You can 
continue to read from that point using  the arrow keys. 

* Streaming audio is offered on most programmes in both the OGG/Vorbis
  and MP3 formats.  Pressing <enter> on either the OGG/Vorbis link or
  the MP3 link will start the audio.  Some items do not offer  this
  choice of formats:  for these, pressing <enter> on the  item link will start the audio.  Audio is started 
in a new window, so when the audio has finished playing, you need to press alt+left arrow to return to the 
programme page. 

* Some systems with some speech synthesisers cannot play synthesised speech and other audio simultaneously.  
If your system is like this, you need to silence speech using the Orca key (usually <insert>) + S before 
pressing <enter> on a link to start streaming audio.  When the audio has finished, pressing <Orca + S> again 
will restart speech. 

* You need a podcast aggregator to be able to download podcasts from the site.  This is software which may 
not be installed by default in your Linux distribution.  Software packages which will do this job, which are 
available on most Linux distributions, and are accessible to screenreaders, are gpodder (graphical interface) 
and hpodder (command line interface).  

* You can get a complete list of key bindings for Orca on Firefox by pressing the Orca key (usually <insert>) 
with <control> and <space>, which brings up the Orca preferences pages for Firefox, and then pressing 
<control> + <page Down> repeatedly until you hear "Key Bindings Page".  You can then read this page using the 
arrow keys.