Re: [orca-list] details on orca support

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

You probably have asked one of those questions without a good answer. 
The thing is that programming possibly comes more naturally to some and 
it depends on the type of person you are.

Before continuing I feel I better state some other ways you could help 
with orca. Firstly many developers think like developers, if you write a 
program you are the best person to know how it works and so what may be 
obvious to the developer isn't obvious to a user. Essentially what I am 
saying is that developers aren't always the best to explain things, a 
"average" user may be better placed to explain to another "average" user 
how to do something. Therefore help in documentation, tutorials, etc is 
certainly valuable work. Without making it possible for people to begin 
using orca we are unlikely to grow the number of developers (eg. Bill 
Cox (I hope Bill doesn't mind me picking him out as an example) said he 
needed some of the tutorials to realise there is accessibility on Linux, 
now look at him, he is helping out with vinux). Even if the people 
coming to Linux only are users, it means Orca will get greater testing, 
more people to report bugs, potentially the better orca should perform. 
So if you find problems please report them.

Another thing which is useful, if you know other languages then may be 
look at helping with orca translations for other languages.

All of the above help developers as it removes the need for them to do 
that work, so freeing their time to write code.

Now should you still feel you want to learn programming, the first thing 
would be learn about python http://www.python.org which has a tutorial 
in its documentation. Also look at dive into python 
http://www.diveintopython.org. However I will say, just knowing the 
programming language isn't enough, you need to be able to follow what 
that code means the computer will do, break things down into small steps 
which can be represented in python, do that in reverse to track down 
where it is going wrong, etc. Then you need to learn about at-spi, 
orca's code,etc. Sorry I don't have the links to hand but I am sure on 
this list in the archives links have been posted to useful information 
(possibly even in this thread). So I will say, its not a small task if 
your coming from no programming knowledge, there is this one point where 
stepping from the python tutorial and dive into python to applications 
like orca you may get stuck. What I am getting at is that the basic 
examples used for teaching python generally all work sequentially but 
orca can have other things going on in the background, eg. a bug I came 
across was that orca was processing an event tried to query information 
about the object which created the event but by the time it made the 
query gnome had destroyed the window so the object was no longer valid 
causing an error, something like this won't happen in basic python 
examples due to the sequential nature. In short orca possibly isn't the 
easiest application to start with.

Michael Whapples
On 01/-10/-28163 08:59 PM, hank smith wrote:
> how hard is it to learn programming fore orca?
> where would I start?
> I never programmed before but I want to help some how
> orca mussant die
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Willie Walker" 
> <walker willie gmail com>
> To: "Bill Cox" <waywardgeek gmail com>
> Cc: <aerospace1028 hotmail com>; <orca-list gnome org>
> Sent: Tuesday, March 02, 2010 5:47 PM
> Subject: Re: [orca-list] details on orca support
>
>
>
> > On Wed, 2010-02-24 at 10:07 -0500, Bill Cox wrote:
> > > I totally agree that we need to look forward.  I see that several
> > > programmers have offered to help on this list.  I've subscribed to the
> > > orca-devel list, but there hasn't been a post there since October.
> >
> > Yeah - we were going to do the world's most wonderful refactor of Orca
> > based upon all that we had learned while creating it.  But...well...you
> > know, the word "refactor" doesn't float so well with management when
> > other words such as "no budget" are in the air.  So, the orca-devel-list
> > is somewhat dormant and we use the orca-list and bugzilla for all of our
> > discussions.
> >
> > > Might it be time to try and fire-up a community effort around Orca?
> > > Willie, with your guidance, there could be several new Orca developers
> > > helping out in short order, I think.  I'm pretty swamped with work and
> > > Vinux support, but longer-term, I'd like to be one of those Orca
> > > developers.
> >
> > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2010-February/msg00117.html has
> > some tips on getting started. Please let me know if you need more
> > information to get going.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > Will
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Orca-list mailing list
> > Orca-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> > Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
> > The manual is at 
> > http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
> > The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
> > Netiquette Guidelines are at 
> > http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions/NetiquetteGuidelines
> > Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org