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>]

Krishnakent,

So, in order to help me keep things organized and avoid superfluous 
redundancy, are you saying that you and your students will be working on 
the Firefox code base? The orca code that works with Firefox or some 
combination of the two?

Do you intend to work on new feature/enhancement requests in FF or only 
fix bugs?

Would you be the Accessible Firefox Maintainer who works with Joanie, 
Bill and fills the liaison between vinux, orca and GNU so all are kept 
abreast of your accomplishments?

I'm fairly certain that GNU can help you find testers for FF with orca 
so do not hesistate to ask for help.
HH,
cdh

On 07/24/2010 04:59 PM, hackingKK wrote:
> On Sunday 25 July 2010 02:11 AM, Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
> > Hey Krishnakant, all.
> yes.
> Joanie.
> thanks to bil,
> I am getting into firefox code slowly.
>
> I am also going to have a team of 4 students under me and we are 
> thinking of assisting in fixing firefox bugs.
> I have just recently started to understand orca code although far from 
> knowing enough to code.
> I will need ur help as well because firefox bugs are getting to us 
> like water over rising over head.
> So we have to do this at war footing.
> Bill can't be left alone in this work and so can't you be expected to 
> do all the work.
> Happy hacking..
> Krishnakant.
>
> > > 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!