Re: [orca-list] Tips debugging Orca

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Bill:

> Here's what I've found so far about Orca as a brand new user on Ubuntu
> 9.04.  It crashes all the time, so often that I've installed xbindkey
> shortcuts to restart it.

Ubuntu has had a series of misfortunate integration events (e.g., Pulse 
Audio) that have caused speech synthesis systems to behave poorly. 
Since Orca uses speech synthesis, people often mistake this as an Orca 
issue.  See the first entry at http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more 
information. If this is the problem you are experiencing, you might 
consider trying a different operating system distribution (e.g., 
OpenSolaris[1]) until Ubuntu works these issues out.

Note also that the graphical emacs UI is notorious for causing a bad 
interaction with the accessibility infrastructure, regardless of which 
operating system you are using.  So, if you're using it, you may end up 
with a hang: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=392889

>   The documentation is poor.  However, it seems
> really close to where it needs to be, and there are very active
> developers helping fix things, which is extremely cool.

Which documentation are you currently viewing and what documentation 
would you like to see?

> However, I don't want to submit bug reports to this forum.  I want to
> submit patches which fix bugs and add features.  What are the best
> techniques for debugging Orca when it is in an infinite loop?

Patches and bug reports posted at http://bugzilla.gnome.org are 
definitely welcome, and it will be nice to see you help our community of 
constructive and helpful developers grow.  Please also take a look at 
http://live.gnome.org/Orca/Bugs.

There is a page at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/Debugging that describes 
how to turn on debugging.  You should also become familiar with the 
AT-SPI infrastructure and the accerciser application.  The AT-SPI is the 
lingua franca of accessibility for GNOME and accerciser is a very 
helpful/useful analysis tool.

Keep in mind that Orca is at the top of the food chain - if something 
beneath it eats something toxic, Orca may become poisoned, too.  Since 
Orca is often the sole means by which some people access the desktop, 
people often mistake failures outside Orca as Orca shortcomings.  It's a 
perfectly natural assumption to make.  As an Orca developer, however, 
the lion's share of our job is rooting out the source of the problem and 
working with responsible parties to resolve the issues.

I'm looking forward to having a new contributor to the community roll 
their sleeves up and help,

Will
Orca Project Lead and GNOME A11y Lead

[1] - 
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/indiana/status/accessibility/AccessibleLiveCd/