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

While I think we can learn some stuff from other screen readers (eg. NVDA), I would say keep in mind gnome and windows are very different environments and if you go too far in making them have the same user interface then it may become unnatural to use (IE. NVDA may have a very windows specific feature which might be sort of close to a concept in gnome but still different, and by trying to make orca behave as if working with the windows one you may miss the power of the gnome feature, eg. flat review is like NVDA's object navigation but they do differ enough).
So while it is good not to make things different just for being different, we probably will have times where there is a good reason for being different. 

Michael Whapples
On -10/01/37 20:59, John G. Heim wrote:
I had been Windows-free at home for a few months but over the weekend I found I had to set up a Windows machine for testing purposes. I installed the latest stable version of nvda and I was very impressed with the user interface. Freedom Scientific could learn a lot from the nvda programmers.
Anyway, I think the two development teams, nvda and orca, should work together on the user interface. I understand that there are bound to be a lot of incompatibilities. But if the same keystroke does the same thing in nvda and orca, it would help make both systems easier to use. You know how often you have to guess what keystroke will do whatever it is you want to do. Well, if you're trying to learn orca, you could benefit from a knowledge of nvda. And if you're trying to learn nvda, you could benefit from knowing orca. 

----- Original Message ----- From: "Alex H." <linuxx64 bashsh gmail com>
To: "Storm Dragon" <stormdragon2976 gmail com>
Cc: "Orca-list" <orca-list gnome org>
Sent: Saturday, April 03, 2010 2:37 PM
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Some of my thoughts about what has been difficultfor getting into orca development and orca scripting 




Add me in for testing as well. I too would be interested in getting
beeping progress bars in Orca.

Take care,

Alex

On 4/3/10, Storm Dragon <stormdragon2976 gmail com> wrote:

Hi,
If you get the progress beeps working I would be more than willing to
help with testing. Just send the code and instructions on how to add it. 
I have wanted progress bar beeps every sense I started using Orca in
2007. It will be absolutely awesome to finally get my wish. Also, just
let me know if there's anything I can do to help.
Thanks
Storm


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On Sat, 2010-04-03 at 14:50 -0400, Joanmarie Diggs wrote:


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

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_______________________________________________
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
Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
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