[orca-list] Mouseover support in Orca has arrived!

[Joanmarie Diggs <joanmarie diggs gmail com>]

Hey folks.

I have just committed Orca's preliminary support for MouseOver objects
into git master. I want to stress "preliminary." <smile> In other words,
the most basic of mouseover objects (e.g. the image links in last.fm's
library page, the Friends link/menu in Facebook, the episode info in the
Hulu queue) are handled. Nested items (such as menus within menus) is
still on our to-do list. And I've not seen all of the mouseovers you
might encounter to know what I failed to take into account. With that
disclaimer in mind, here's the deal:

There is a new command which will move focus to and away from the object
which appeared as a result of hovering the mouse over an item in web
content. This command is bound to Orca+KP_Multiply for the Desktop
layout and Orca+0 in the laptop layout. The way you would take advantage
of this command is to do the following:

1. Move focus to an object which you know/suspect has an associated
mouseover.

2. Route the pointer to that object using Orca+KP_Divide/Orca+9.  If a
new mouseover object appears as a result, Orca should announce what it
is.

3. If you think the new object that appeared might be of interest, you
can move focus to that new object with Orca+KP_Multiply/Orca+0.

4. You should be able to interact with the new object like any other
content. If you decide the mouse-over object is not of interest after
all, or if the mouse-over object merely presented information and you're
done reading it, you can press Orca+KP_Multiply/Orca+0 a second time.
This will move the mouse pointer back to where it was before you routed
it. The act of doing so should cause the mouse-over object to disappear.
Focus will then be restored to the object you were on prior to accessing
the mouse over.

Known issues which are out of our hands:

1. At the moment, we have no way of finding out via at-spi if an object
has an associated onMouseOver or not. It turns out there is already a
bug filed against Mozilla for the exposure of onMouse* stuff. Until that
gets fixed, I'm afraid you really do have to know/suspect an object has
a mouseover.

2. If memory serves me, at least one Windows screen reader informs you
if the only change resulting from hovering the mouse over an object was
one of visual appearance. From the cases I've looked at so far, I'm not
seeing any events being exposed to us which we could use to implement
the same thing should doing so be desirable. The good news is that the
recently-added support for routing the pointer to the current object
seems to be reliable. In other words, if you route the mouse pointer to
your current location in Firefox and Orca is silent, then you should
assume that no new objects resulted from the hovering.

For the rest of the issues, I've opened an uber-bug, i.e. a bug that
totally violates Orca community practice of "one issue per bug report."
The reason I did this was to make it easier for y'all to identify if the
problem you're having with a mouseover on foo.com is actually just
another example of the problem being seen on bar.com -- and to make it
easier for me to look for patterns as I continue working on Orca's
mouseover support. That bug is:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=589726

Thanks! Looking forward to your feedback. Take care.
--joanie