[orca-list] The current state of Orca master

[Joanmarie Diggs <joanied gnome org>]

Hey all.

Today (make that yesterday) may very well go down in the history books
as "Craziest Day Ever." <smile> But now that I'm getting caught up on
everything else.... I wanted to update you on where things stand with
Orca master:

      * Regarding the System voice: 
              * It is committed to master. It also went into the 2.31.90
                release. 
              * More improvements have been made based on your reports
                (also in master and the release). Thanks again for all
                that feedback! 
              * If it is Gecko-related (i.e. Firefox, Thunderbird,
                InstantBird, whatever): Roles aren't right at all. Blank
                lines are not spoken in the system voice. Attila sees
                intonation issues. In other words, access to HTML
                content works. The voices should not be vastly screwed
                up (e.g. all in system voice; nothing in default voice).
                But operate under the assumption that Gecko system voice
                is not implemented because, largely, that is the case.
                Dealing with this is next on my agenda. (I've got three
                super-long DayJob days, but I'll be aroundish in case of
                emergency, and hopefully hacking late evening on this
                stuff.) 
              * If you find a bug in the System Voice implementation,
                especially one that is *not* Gecko related, please add a
                comment to the still-open System Voice bug [1] 
      * Regarding support for sighted users with learning disabilities
        (and anyone else who really hates more than minimal speech): 
              * This is now in master; it did *not* go into the 2.31.90
                release. While I think it is right, it needs more
                testing. Unstable releases should still be stable.
                Yadda, yadda, yadda. 
              * There is a new checkbox on the Speech page (down with
                all the other checkboxes) called 'only speak displayed
                text'. In theory it should do as advertised. <smile>
                Having said that, please keep the following in mind: The
                implementation is that if that checkbox is checked and
                only displayed text should be spoken, the thing that
                won't be spoken are things in the System Voice. In other
                words, if text which is not on screen is spoken, it's
                almost certainly not a bug here; it's a bug in the
                System Voice implementation. So to state what I hope is
                now obvious, if it's in Gecko, it's probably not working
                right. Currently. 
              * Oh no! Someone shuffled the speech checkboxes around!
                (Sorry, sleep-deprivation sillies have set in.) But all
                kidding aside, you may be wondering why all the speech
                checkboxes have been re-arranged. They've been
                re-grouped. If you check the option to only speak
                displayed text, it doesn't matter if you've enabled
                position in list, or tutorial, or mnemonic, etc. Those
                things won't be spoken because those things are not
                displayed as text on the screen. So if you check only
                speak displayed text, we now grey out all of the
                now-irrelevant checkboxes. And in order to do that
                effectively, they all needed to be in a single
                GtkContainer. 
              * The primary thing we need to be testing here is that
                Orca works for you like it always has. It is my hope to
                get users and developers from the LD community to test
                and give feedback on issues related to any LD-specific
                options we might wish to implement. 
              * If you find bugs that are not likely System Voice bugs,
                please add them to the currently open bug for this new
                feature. [2] 
      * "What's that thing dead center on my screen?" Or, "My friend
        just told me Orca has a splash screen. He's kidding, right?"
        <grins> No. He's not kidding. We really do have a splash screen
        now. It's in master and the 2.31.90 release. But there's method
        to the madness: Before, if you had disabled the Orca main window
        and launched (or relaunched) Orca, you likely would have no idea
        where you were because no window claimed focus. (And thus we
        didn't know where you were either.) So we could do all sorts of
        really ugly, non-performant things to figure out where you might
        be. Or we could have a pretty splash screen that, upon going
        away, caused the window with focus to claim focus in the form of
        a window:activate event. We went with the latter. Props to Will
        Walker, who had the idea. Props to Ale for implementing the fix.
        Props to the artist at Emergya for the image. And for those of
        you who are curious, I have just added a detailed description of
        its appearance to the wiki. [3]
      * Now that Orca has a splash screen that triggers window:activate
        events, you may stop Alt+Tabbing to figure out where you are
        after launching Orca. If so, you may find that if focus is in a
        text widget or terminal, Orca doesn't respond to caret-moved
        events. That is, unfortunately, due to the fact that even the
        prettiest splash screen cannot force applications to do the
        right thing (like have the focused widget claim focus). If apps
        don't tell us where you are, we don't know where you are. As you
        may have seen earlier, Ale has opened a new bug for this issue.
        [4] And there is a patch attached which could use your testing
        love.

Phew! I think that's everything I needed to tell you. Sorry for the long
message.

Take care.
--joanie

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543157
[2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=520595
[3] http://live.gnome.org/Orca/SplashScreen
[4] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627052