Re: [orca-list] need a quick overview of orca with thunderbird.

[Steve Holmes <steve holmes88 gmail com>]

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Well, I find Thunderbird to be fairly self explanatory and from my
experience, no special Orca considerations needed.  Orca does have a
script supplied that deals with the Mozilla side of things and from
what I can tell, handles thunderbird and shreder quite smoothly.

For quick navigation, I'll try and summarize what I do on my system.
I use Thunderbird with two IMAP accounts so when I get into the
program, I have to be sure I'm in the right node of the treeview for
the mail account I want to follow.  When you open the program for the
first time, you will get the wizzards used to set up new accounts.  I
won't go into account specific stuff here because I'm sure that varies
depending on your mail account parameters.  But after the first-time
stuff is out of the way, tab around the interface and hear the types
of contreols shown.  You get a tree table which will be the mail
accounts and folders under each account like INBOX, sent mail, trash,
etc.  These talk fine with Orca and just arrowing around should cause
a normal tree table behavior with spoken confirmation of where you
are.  Then tab once to place you in the message list for that folder.
Here, arrowing up and down the vertical list will speak the message
you're on and also the status if the message is unread, has
attachment, expanded or collapsed thread, date, time, etc.  One thing
I always do with Thunderbird on any platform is to turn off any
previewing of messages.  Go into the View menu and look for message
preview or something very similar.  I can't remember if it is on the
top level of the view menu or if you have to go into one of the other
menus like folder or sort options.  I like threaded mail so I go in
and set threading to be on in the Sort submenu of View.  Also, while
on a message thread in the message list, pressing the KP_Enter key
twice quickly will read the status line and from that you will hear
how many messages are in the folder and the number of selected
messages is usually how many messages there are in that thread.

Reading message bodies is pretty easy with Orca too.  I just hit enter
on the desired message and it opens and I can use the usual structural
navigation keys we can use with Firefox.  It's just like viewing a web
page.  One thing I should point out here is by default the latest
versions of thunderbird default to openning the message detail in the
same instance of thunderbird and not in separate windows.  If this
ends up being your situation, you will need to close the message with
Ctrl-W; escape will not do it.  I also had some other issues I can't
exactly explain now but found it easier to configure the program to
open messages in separate windows.  When configured this way, I could
use the Escape key to close the window and there was no chance of
ending up with several messages opened at the same time.  Oh, won
other thing, When composing a message, press Ctrl-Enter to close and
send the message to cancel editing of a message, hit Ctrl-W.

Hope this overview helps.  I'm sure I may have missed some important
details some place but this should be a pretty good start.  By and
large, I have pretty good luck sith Thunderbird.  This is one
excellent example of where a program works much better with Orca than
it does with Windows using Window-Eyes.  The orca implementation
appears to be much more accessible.

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 09:57:02PM +0530, Krishnakant wrote:
> Hello,
> The subject line says it all.
> I am going to give a lecture in a blind school on using Ubuntu with
> Orca.
> They at the school are planning to shift entirely to orca on their 25
> machines.
> I would want to introduce thunderbird and if any one is using it right
> now with orca version 2.27.3 or 2.27.2 on ubuntu 9.04, I will be very
> happy if I can get the run-down of all the keyboard commands to navigate
> through the list of mails by subject and to read and reply emails.
>
> My lecture is on coming sunday so it is kind of a bit urgent.
>
> Please contribute to my humble attempt to make orca more popular in
> India.
>
> Happy hacking.
> Krishnakant.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Orca-list mailing list
> Orca-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
> The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
> The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
> Netiquette Guidelines are at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions/NetiquetteGuidelines
> Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
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