Re: [orca-list] Some of my thoughts about what has been difficult for getting into orca development and orca scripting

[Joanmarie Diggs <joanmarie diggs gmail com>]

Hey Michael.

On Fri, 2010-04-02 at 21:33 +0100, Michael Whapples wrote:

> Thinking about features I might like to see added which are a definite 
> goal, two spring to mind. One being supporting MathML in firefox (I 
> think far too ambitious to start with).

Whether or not it winds up being far too ambitious to start with is
something I'm not sure of. The problem you'll run up against currently
is lack of Gecko support for it.

You may be aware of this Orca RFE:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=526436
("[blocked] Orca should provide access to MathML content in Firefox")

The Mozilla bug which is blocking us is here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=427330
(MathML objects exposed as "dead" accessibles via at-spi)

It's a couple of years old now. Since you have an interest in seeing
this implemented, perhaps it would be of use to ping the Mozilla guys on
the Mozilla bug and start a dialog about how to implement a solution
which, in turn, would make it possible for us to handle it within Orca.

>  The other is having progress 
> bars giving increasing tones as they get to higher percentages like in 
> NVDA. Now looking at those, guess the second is easier, partly I have an 
> idea what would be needed, something to listen for progress bar changed 
> events (whatever the actual at-spi name is for it) and then depending on 
> a setting in orca putting out a tone through something like gstreamer (I 
> have some of the ideas used in gstreamer understood and as its a gnome 
> framework it seems sensible to use).

As I recall, Rui Batista has done some work in this area. I'm hoping
he'll chime in.

>  One bit I don't quite know is how 
> to define a setting for orca and eventually that setting should be shown 
> in orca preferences. May be nudge me in the right direction here, does 
> this sound good for starting thoughts, or should I look at even simpler 
> tasks than the audio for progress bar changes?

In terms of making things bite sized, it might be worth tackling them as
separate problems:

1. Implement sound for progress bars (we won't actually check that in
without a setting, but it doesn't *need* to have a setting for you to
get this feature working.)

2. Add a setting.

The way we do settings within Orca at the moment is less than ideal, and
largely the result of the Orca team's lacking profound insight (and/or
psychic ability) in the early days into what all we'd need to implement
settings-wize to meet user requirements. So it got built up as we went.

A while back, I started looking at moving everything to gconf. But gconf
is being deprecated by the GNOME community. So had we gone that route,
we'd be forced to make (another) switch/move in our settings. Because we
didn't, the broader community simply frowns at us for rolling our own
settings handling. <grin> My intent is to address this after the GNOME
community completes the gconf deprecation.

I will add the writing of documentation related to how to add a new
setting within Orca to my to-do list. In the meantime, here is an
example commit that Attila did to add the option to have Orca speak the
position of an object (e.g. within a list or group):

http://git.gnome.org/browse/orca/commit/?id=3a39a802476a741e3341e36cedfbb2f3e3fc2aca

HTH. Take care.
--joanie