[orca-list] Perhaps a different "call to arms" is in order (was Re: Firefox 4.0 and Tabbing to Links)

[Joanmarie Diggs <joanmarie diggs gmail com>]

Hey Krishnakant, all.

> I know the mozila team is very serious about accessibility.

Indeed. The Mozilla Foundation has been quite generous over the years in
terms of supporting Orca specifically and GNOME a11y in general. Through
their funding a number of years ago, we had additional contributors
(Eitan Isaacson and Scott Haeger). And they have made it possible for
core GNOME a11y developers to attend hackfests and other GNOMEish events
where we can sit down and work together to solve the very real problems
we face. In other words, it's very clear to me that Mozilla is concerned
with accessibility.

Having said that.... I'm afraid we do not always get very timely
responses to the Mozilla bugs which impact us. :-( I regularly have to
go through the bugs I've opened and add comments like "Hi. It's been six
months and this bug really impacts Orca users. Any updates?" And then
repeat the process six months later -- often on the very same bugs.

Here is the "dependency tree" of bugs blocking 374212 (i.e. the Orca
metabug in Mozilla's bugzilla) [1]. You'll notice at the top that it
says "Bug 374212 depends on 409 open bugs." 409!?! Mind you, most of
those bugs are not bugs I filed. Instead, they bugs which must be fixed
in order for bugs I've filed to be fixed. Nonetheless, there are an
awful lot of Mozilla bugs we need fixed in order for Orca users to have
compelling access to Firefox.

And as for why Orca + Firefox is so slow. I'm sure that there are many
improvements that can be made in Orca w.r.t. performance. However, a
non-trivial part of the performance problem is that there are so many
bugs and other issues in Mozilla that we have to hack around that we
jump through hoops just to locate the next line and more hoops to put
together the contents of the line and we do a bunch of checking
throughout the process because we cannot always trust what Mozilla
exposes to us via AT-SPI, etc., etc., etc.

Therefore, if a "call to arms" is indeed in order, perhaps this sort of
thing would be a candidate for its focus.

--joanie

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=374212&hide_resolved=1