[orca-list] Pidgin 2.5.3 accessibility improvements

[Nolan Darilek <nolan thewordnerd info>]

Today on a whim I downloaded and installed Pidgin 2.5.3. I'd also seen 
in the changelog that they'd made the conversation history accessible 
via f6/shift-f6, so since I've been enormously frustrated at the 
difficulty of flat reviewing chat history, which is essential in 
technical chats where I might need to review a config or source code 
snippet, I wondered what the accessibility implications might be.

In a word, wow. The chat history is fully accessible and scrollable as 
if it were a document. Continuous read seems to work, and it appears 
that position is saved in chats, so if I enter the chat history window, 
switch to a new chat tab then return to the first tab, both the fact 
that I was in the chat history window and my place in that window are 
restored. The user list is also accessible and can be arrowed through, 
and presumably I can open private chats. Most importantly, if I am 
reviewing conversation history and a new message arrives, my place in 
that history isn't lost. Before, it was difficult to have several chat 
tabs open, because an inbound message on any tab caused flat review 
position to be lost. Now my twitter notifications and IRC chats happen 
side-by-side, and I can review them all at my leisure.

Anyhow, just wanted to point that out. There's a Ubuntu PPA for the 
interested, on the first page of google search results. I've just been 
playing with this for half an hour, so there may still be lurking 
gotchas and I don't have the resources to support those, but I thought 
I'd let folks know about this improvement.

Note to developers: I'll keep playing with this for a few days to ensure 
that it works as expected, but if it does then I'll close the bug that I 
opened about the cursor snapping back to the text input area for all new 
messages. This new behavior is much more ideal and, as of now, seems to 
address all of my issues.