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

[Christian Hofstader <cdh gnu org>]

Hi Joanie,

I thought I included orca specifically as an area that needed 
volunteers. If not, my "call to arms" message was incomplete in that I 
had hoped to hear from people who I would send along to you for 
prioritization and assignment given the factor that we want the vols to 
have fun and work on things they too find important.

We are trying to raise money to hire some FTE hackers to work on 
problems that the volunteer community doesn't answer.

I see the GNU role in all of this as being as much of a traffic cop as 
an actual software development group as there is a lot of stuff that 
already has solid leadership (like you for instance) and it would be far 
easier on me if I could send people to you and then enjoy their work 
when it's ready.

As for Mozilla accessibility, I haven't seen much out of them that isn't 
specific to Windows in a really long time. I haven't talked to Marco in 
a long time so I've no feel for the "skinny" on their accessibility efforts.

HH,
cdh


On 07/24/2010 04:41 PM, Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
>    

--
Happy Hacking,
cdh

Christian Hofstader
Director of Access Technology
FSF/Project GNU
http://www.gnu.org, http://www.fsf.org
GNU's Not Unix!