[orca-list] Inconsistent behavior in flat review mode across applications

["David E. Price" <deprice cs utah edu>]

Hi,

Flat review mode behaves differently in Firefox/Thunderbird than in 
other applications (in this case, gnome-terminal and gedit). In 
gnome-terminal and gedit, flat review always starts from the point of 
focus within the application, and whenever that point of focus is 
changed, flat review automatically moves to that point of focus. For 
example, let's say you want to manipulate a file in gnome-terminal, but 
the file name is similar enough to many other file names in the 
directory so that auto-completion won't help very much. You navigate to 
the file name you want, spell it out, then start typing the file name. 
At this point, flat review moves back to the command line.  If you are 
unsure of dots, dashes, capitalization, etc., you must navigate with 
flat review back to the file name once again to get the information you 
need.

In Firefox/Thunderbird, once you enter flat review mode, flat review's 
focus will not return to the application's focus unless you press 
numpad-minus (desktop layout).

So, three  questions:

1.)  Can anyone else duplicate this behavior?

2.) Which of these behaviors is the designed behavior?

3.) Which of these behaviors would the Orca community prefer?

I'm guessing, but I think the designed behavior is the one exhibited in 
gnome-terminal and gedit. However, I would prefer the second behavior, 
since there are times when I would like to review information away from 
the application's focus and be able to return immediately to the 
application's point of focus. However, I recognize that this would take 
a lot more processing, as the flat review cursor's "model" of the screen 
content would have to be continuously updated.

I'll file bugs and/or RFEs as needed, based on the responses to those 
questions.

thanks,

dave