Re: [orca-list] pidgin 2.6.4 and orca

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi All:

Just so a critical point I tried to make doesn't get lost: I highly 
encourage all users to raise accessibility issues directly with the 
product teams.

To use a tired cliche - there is strength in numbers.  Your voice is 
important. Advocating for yourself can be a pain in the butt, but I also 
know from personal experience that many of you are very adept at the 
art.  Very adept.  ;-)

You need to be part of the movement to help bring about the cultural 
shift for mainstream developers to make accessibility part of their 
every day design and development practices.  Until we see a cultural 
shift happen, we will remain stuck in the unscalable solution of "Joanie 
and Willie will fix it."

So, let the product teams know that you have difficulty accessing their 
user interfaces. These are all "teachable moments" for the development 
teams. Many of them have no clue whatsoever. Let them know specifically 
what is not working, what you're trying to do, what you expect to 
happen, what could be better. Follow the three C's: clear, concise, and 
constructive.

Will

Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
> Hi Will, Zack.
>
> On Tue, 2009-12-01 at 09:44 -0500, Willie Walker wrote:
>
> > I haven't had a chance to test pidgin 2.6.4.  Unlike the stock market, 
> > past performance from the pidgin team is usually a good indicator of 
> > future performance, which means they are likely to break accessibility 
> > when they update the user interface. ;-)
>
> Heheh. In this case, having just built pidgin 2.6.4 in OpenSolaris, it
> looks like they may have changed something that we were counting on
> w.r.t. the hierarchy and/or events which get emitted. Using Accerciser,
> I'm seeing appropriate events and accessible objects. In light of
> this...
>
> Zack, I'd ask that you'd hold off on the following:
>
> > Can you please log a bug with the Pidgin project and CC me?  I can 
> > certainly do it, but I think the message is much more powerful if it 
> > comes from an end user.
> >
> > http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/TipsForBugReports
>
> At least until further triage indicates that they really did break
> something.
>
> What is helpful when stuff like the following is observed:
>
> > Zachary Kline wrote:
> > > Hi All,
> > > I made the rather unpleasant discovery today that ArchLinux upgrading
> > > pidgin to 2.6.4 broke the orca script for it completely.  I have orca
> > > 2.28.1 at the moment from the arch repository.
>
> is to file a bug against Orca in GNOME's bugzilla. That ensures it
> remains on our radar. I've gone ahead and filed one for you:
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=603520
>
> The other thing which would be helpful -- phenomenal, even -- is some
> community help with bug triage. For instance, if the bug is "Orca no
> longer speaks incoming chat messages in Pidgin" (which is what I'm
> seeing with 2.6.4), Accerciser's event monitor and/or Orca's debug
> output could be used to see if those messages appear in the form of
> text-changed events. If they are (and it seems that they are), then it's
> likely an Orca bug. If they are not, then it's likely a Pidgin bug.
>
> Where this comes in handy, at least for me, is when a little spare time
> presents itself. Today, I took a lunch break from my day job and decided
> to look at this issue. The time spent doing the triage, filing the bug
> against Orca, and composing this message is about the same amount of
> time I suspect it would've taken me to fix a problem of this nature.
> Unfortunately, my lunch break is now over, so I didn't actually get to
> working on the fix.
>
> The other thing that would come in handy is more specific details about
> what has broken. When I saw "broke the orca script for it completely" I
> was expecting some serious and disturbing accessibility flaw. In my
> testing thus far, that has not proven to be the case. If you're seeing
> additional problems with the latest version of Pidgin, please add them
> to the above Orca bug.
>
> > > I wonder if this sort of breakage is reason enough to run orca from the
> > > source repository?
>
> That wouldn't help you with this particular bug -- at least not yet --
> because we didn't know about this particular bug. Once we've addressed
> this bug, using git master would be the way to get the fix immediately.
> Otherwise, it should wind up in the next release of 2.28.
>
> Thanks and take care.
> --joanie