Re: [orca-list] Opportunity to Contribute to GNOME Accessibility: Orca Performance Improvements

[Steve Holmes <steve holmes88 gmail com>]

Glad to hear that the other stuff is still proceeding nicely.  Yeah, I
suppose the commit history can sometimes be a false indication of the
real progress of a project.  I recalled some meetings were going on
and I'm sure that holds up date to day progress.

To address the question of documentation contributed from users, I've
added some stuff to the wiki page a while back for installing talking
gdm on Arch Linux.  I suppose as I start finding my way through Orca's
code, I could add appropriate comments in the wiki to help others who
might venture into this area.  In fact, I might try and appropriately
edit and post some of those e-mails I kept into the wiki for others to
use.  I'll just have to find the right place to add these.  That might
be a good help until I learn more actual detail that can help
development.

I still have on my plate some minor changes I would like to add to
Orca as enhancements but I had understood that the bugs were more
pressing so I kind of held back on these other things.  However, I
think I might learn Orca internals in one case better if I go with my
enhancement.  I'm referring to this bit of adding a message to speak
the status of the insert mode in things like gedit and OOo Writer.  I
began to figure out the gedit thing so maybe I should forge ahead on
that one.  I was earlier beginning to look at a deal for flat review
but I bogged down a bit when I was trying to figure out exactly which
module was involved.  See, several modules in Orca subclass off one
another.

Sometimes I feel like not much progress is being made by my efforts
and yet I talk about doing big things for Orca <sigh>.  So I forge
along here and hopefully I can some time soon have some substance to
show for my talking here.

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 10:17:57AM -0500, Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
> Hey all.
>
> > Yeah, it's been awful quiet around here.  Other than some foreign
> > translations here and there, the commit log has been rather quiet
> > lately too.  Other than a couple bug fixes.
>
> Well, that's for several reasons:
>
> 1. The profiles and backend work being wrapped up in a separate branch
> is being tested.
>
> 2. Ale and I had Boston Summit followed by "Nashua Summit" (I live in
> Nashua). At the "Nashua Summit" Ale and I spent three days face-to-face
> going over all of the current code and planning an architectural
> refactor which will ultimately result in Orca's code being more
> approachable and Orca itself more extensible (e.g. through plugins). Ale
> has just now returned to Spain and I am just now back and able to just
> work on Orca. Summits and hackfests are awesome, but they do mean that
> day-to-day coding goes on hold.
>
> 3. I need to update our documentation and have been working on that.
>
> 4. I've been testing WebKitGtk+Orca. Still a work in progress, but the
> goal is to have minimal changes in Orca. So the bulk of the WebKitGtk
> work is something you will never see as a commit.
>
> So please do not interpret lack of tons of commits to master to mean
> that we're not working hard on Orca. I would argue that we're working
> harder than ever, with the end result being far better and far greater
> than you'd get from a bunch of small commits.
>
> For what it's worth....
> --joanie