[orca-list] Experimenting with openoffice.org accessibility

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

I had an opportunity over the weekend to experiment with openoffice.org under
Orca. Note that I'm not planning intending to use this for any real work (I'm
by preference a LaTeX user, not a word processor user). Thus the issues aren't
going to affect me - at least not yet, so there's no urgency/priority
attached to them.

The version of Orca is 2.30.2, Openoffice.org 3.2.1 (Debian).

1. First some discrepancies between the braille and the speech output, some of
which may be my fault:

a. In the formatting tool bar, the status of each button (on/off) is spoken
but not displayed in the braille output.

b. I haven't been able to find a braille equivalent for the "Where am I" (both
basic and detailed), "get title" and "get status bar" commands. I am aware,
however, that this might all have been fixed in the braille output redesign
that Joanie implemented some time ago (I can't remember which version received
the fixes now).

If I use the braille display command that moves to the last line of the
screen, I get the status bar, but shifting the braille window to the right
doesn't reveal the entire text (i.e., it's truncated).

2. Pressing F11 in OO.O writer to access the styles and formatting options
gives the following.

DEQUEUED EVENT object:state-changed:showing <---------- vvvvv PROCESS OBJECT
EVENT object:state-changed:showing vvvvv OBJECT EVENT:
object:state-changed:showing             detail=(0,0) app.name='soffice'
name='Styles and Formatting' role='frame' state='enabled resizable sensitive'
relations=''

So, although anyone who wasn't reading the debug log wouldn't realize it, the
styles and formatting frame is marked as being shown, but the focus hasn't
moved there (by design, as far as I can tell). I tried various strategies (F6
repeatedly, Alt-tab, etc.) to move the focus there, but with no luck.

I also found out that issuing ctrl-F11 to select the "apply styles" panel,
then moving to the "more..." item and pressing enter, displays the styles and
formatting frame, but Orca seems to lose track of the focus at that point, if
I'm reading the debug logs correctly.

3. I couldn't find a means of determining where paragraph breaks are, or where
style changes occur, while reading the text of a document. There is also no
equivalent of the WordPerfect "reveal codes" feature. Of course, the other
method is to examine the content.xml file containing the document in an
XML-aware editor. Unfortunately the XML syntax produced by OO.O is very
verbose, so it isn't fun. If I needed to edit an ODF document, I'd probably
convert it to LaTeX using the writer2latex package and edit it in that form,
or alternatively export it to docbook and then edit.

Regarding the Orca-related issues, if anyone can confirm which of them are
likely to be bugs, I'll try to find time later this week to write out bug
reports.