[orca-list] When does navigation become available in Firefox

[Nolan Darilek <nolan thewordnerd info>]

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OK, think I may be hitting an odd situation here, wherein there is a bug
in my web server that is manifesting as an a11y issue. I know that seems
odd and convoluted, but hear me out. :)

I'm setting up Diaspora, a new open source social networking platform,
on Mongrel2, a new open source web server. Both are still under lots of
active early development, and as such they each have bugs.

I notice that when I navigate to my Diaspora instance, I can't tab
around the window until I first press escape, at which point I hear
"100%". When I run my Diaspora instance directly, though, or when I use
someone else's that isn't using M2, this problem doesn't manifest. Also,
when someone else uses my instance through M2, they don't experience the
inability to tab but *do* experience other issues, so it's definitely a
configuration issue. To make things even more complicated, sometimes
things work on first run, sometimes they don't, and sometimes Firebug
reports that I've received an HTML response but none of it is visible to
Orca at all, either when tabbing around or via flat review.

Why I'm asking about this, though, is that I have noticed this inability
to tab around some pages until I press escape, making me think that it
happens when a background connection is taking longer than it should.
I'm curious about two things.

1. When exactly does it happen? If I could tell either the Diaspora
folks or my web server developers something like "Orca does its own
focus management to work around firefox a11y issues, and doesn't make
keyboard navigation commands available until all remote assets are
loaded and event X is received from Firefox," then that may give me
something more tangible to say in the bug reports. Right now, all I can
say is "pages aren't keyboard navigable in many instances until I press
escape if I run Orca," which is a bit less substantial.

2. Given that I've occasionally experienced this issue on
correctly-configured servers, I wonder if there might be another way
around it? Assuming for instance that keyboard navigation isn't allowed
until all assets are loaded and all requests are complete, maybe it can
be allowed earlier on in the process with the understanding that some
page elements may not be completely loaded and available yet?

Sorry, it isn't my intent to make everything that happens while running
Orca an Orca issue--it really annoys me when people report *every single
Android application crash to me* just because I wrote the screen reader
they're using on their phone--but as has been indicated here many times,
Orca is having to work around lots of Firefox issues itself. So when
something happens in the browser, I don't know enough about the inner
workings of either to know where Orca's responsibility and ability ends,
and that of Firefox begins.

If you want a Diaspora instance to play with to see this behavior in
action, check out http://me.thewordnerd.info. Please don't mess with
this just to test Diaspora, as there are plenty of seeds for that
purpose which you can find on your own. I'm just publicising this URL so
that any interested testers can help track down this behavior where it
relates to Orca and Firefox.

Thanks.
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