Re: [orca-list] Live regions in a non-web application?

[Nolan Darilek <nolan thewordnerd info>]

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On 05/04/2010 09:27 AM, Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
> That's what's going on. Orca's live region support was implemented for
> Gecko a few years ago. I'm in the process of doing various and sundry
> refactoring in Orca, and it sounds like I need to add generalizing live
> region support to my list. :-)

Hey, this would rock! I was thinking that this might have been a
JAWS-ism, but having this support universalized to any app written using
any toolkit would be great. I'm using live regions in a web app I'm
writing specifically to be accessible and find that they support most of
what I need for accessibility right out of the box. Having it
universalized would eliminate the need for a whole plethora of scripting
use cases, I'd think, or would at least eliminate the need for a bunch
of code duplication.

I wonder if it might also be possible to universalize some of the
automatic change detection code as well? When developing my web app, I
found that Orca sometimes spoke too *much*, so I specifically needed to
use aria-live="off" in some areas. I acknowledge that too much
chattiness isn't great either, but I think that it might be better to
shut Orca up rather than to make it talk. At least script developers
know what is being changed automatically and can take actions to silence
it, either by toggling updates off or by writing a script to ignore
events. This would also unite how one might make web and desktop apps
more or less accessible, if not in code then in method. IOW, it would
just be a matter of setting a correct aria-live property on the
associated widget or HTML item. Desktop apps could support this via Orca
scripts while web apps might use something like Greasemonkey, but in
either case, the method for making apps talk would be the same. I
realize this is probably much easier said than done, in which case I
blame the coffee.

Anyhow, just a thought. Please let us know when this lands.
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