Re: [orca-list] Experimenting with openoffice.org accessibility

[Steve Holmes <steve holmes88 gmail com>]

I just checked out the F11 and Ctrl+F11 key combinations and they
seemed to work good with speech for me.  I think OOo Writer 3.2 has a
lot of a11y problems as far as I'm concerned.  I know with that
version, I could not get the navigator (F5) to work right either.  I'm
running a development version (3.4 something) on my Arch Linux box and
the navigator and styles options appear to work fine.  I'm not real
clear how the Ctrl-F11 deal is supposed to work but that's probably
due to my own ignorance of the thing.  But I had good speech through
all these dialogs.

Unfortunately, I do not own any braile display equipment so cannot
verify any of your other results.  But try and see if you can get a
later version of OOo (maybe from testing) and perhaps these broken
options may work better.

On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 02:38:04PM +1000, Jason White wrote:
> 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.
>
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