[orca-list] Recent accessibility regressions

[Nolan Darilek <nolan thewordnerd info>]

Last night I upgraded orca via svn and my terminal, plus a few other 
windows, stopped speaking. Specifically I typed a message in Thunderbird 
with very minimal audio feedback, and all I could do was review the 
message line-by-line.

So remembering that Orca svn was intended for GNOME 2.24, I upgraded to 
Intrepid. The upgrade itself went fine, and my system seems to be 
running mostly well, with the exception of some accessibility regressions.

First, the panels seem very broken. I can tab around, but I've already 
managed to get into a stuck state where ctrl-alt-tab, nor any other key 
combination, gets me out of the panels. I tried alt-tab, alt-f1, 
alt-f2... Orca is still speaking as I can arrow back and forth between a 
few items. I even tried clicking on the "get help on Ubuntu" item, no luck.

Most disturbing, though, is that Firefox is now almost entirely 
unusable. I can tab around webpages, but arrowing doesn't work. Neither 
do any of orca's navigational keys, so I can't move to a header, for 
instance. Carrot-browsing is enabled, but I can't even use insert-z or 
insert-f12 to determine what is controlling the carrot. It's as if Orca 
doesn't know that FF is running. If I start the FF-specific preferences, 
I hear "Loading preferences for Firefox," but I don't see the prefs I 
once saw for FF--rather, I hear the text attributes tab twice.

Everything else seems to work well, and in particular I'm noticing 
better feedback in Thunderbird now. My terminal is also once again 
speaking. I'm running Orca 2.24.0 and FF 3.0.3. I've cleaned out all my 
local installs, so I'm certain I'm not running an old at-spi or 
something similar.

Thanks for your time.

P.S. As an experiment, I just did a make clean, then a fresh compile and 
install of orca svn. Not only did FF still fail, but my terminal and 
thunderbird regressed, the former not speaking at all unless I used flat 
review, the latter only speaking if I arrow around or use + to read all. 
When I removed the install and used gnome-orca as shipped with ubuntu, 
the terminal/thunderbird regressions went away, though FF is still broken.