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

Just one quick tip.
I can take up the coordination work on high priority.
I am a software engineer by profession but have not studied Orca or ff code in details. 
But I can very well understand the technicalities and can make things work.
I will take some time to actually start coding in myself, but my students have all the time in the world to work on it full-time. 
happy hacking.
Krishnakant.



On Sunday 25 July 2010 07:32 PM, Christian Hofstader wrote:

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
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