Re: [orca-list] Measures to reduce Orca and Gnome crashes

[Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs igalia com>]

Hey guys.

On Fri, 2011-12-30 at 09:45 -0800, Steve Holmes wrote:

[...]

> Orca.  So there you are; gnome is a mess right now.  I'm really
> tempted to uninstall gnome completely from my laptop and install xfce
> instead but I'm not sure right now the status of Orca and these more
> light wait desktop environments.

In my experience, in an environment in which you can run Orca from
master (i.e. have the right version of pygobject, recent enough Gtk+ 3,
etc.) you will have one challenge with XFCE (built from master) and
that's enabling accessibility for XFCE itself because of a different
setting. The rest was working pretty well last time I checked.

I'll add re-checking to my list of things to do -- and might could be
persuaded to add a hack to master in the meantime to set that value.
<smiles> As a matter of fact, if doing this -- along with providing
step-by-step instructions for building XFCE from master -- will get
everybody to test Orca master, that might be all the persuasion I'll
need. <grins> You see, basically, I'm working on an uber-refactor with
three goals:

1. Clean up a ton of code, centralize the stability sanity checks, etc.
2. Add dedicated "mode" support, including "off screen" support.
3. Create a scripting language.

1 is coming along nicely. Igalia makes it possible for Orca work to be a
significant part of my DayJob. Finally and yay!

2 will mean a couple of things: The existing "modes" (which are
currently a mess and also entwined in Orca proper) will become their own
modules with their own event listeners and handlers. As a result, we not
only can have much cleaner existing modes, we can much more easily have
new and cool modes. For instance, I personally think the "virtual
buffer" is an evil beast <grins>, but it will become possible to create
a mode which more or less replicates that functionality. We might even
be able to do a mode which acts more or less like Voice Over. This I
don't know, but I'm betting on it as a sufficiently reasonable
possibility. (Where "bet" == a brand new mac mini was delivered today so
I can become familiar with its user interaction.)

3 will hopefully be at least a start toward answering the issue of "I
want to contribute to Orca and/or make Orca work better for me, but I
don't know AT-SPI and I don't know much about Python, etc." This won't
prevent anyone who knows all about AT-SPI and Python from creating tools
that way. It will just be a new option for mere mortals.

But I digress.... Because I am pretty much changing EVERYTHING in Orca,
I need some testers. If that means taking a break to sort out XFCE's
state, I'll do it.

Take care.
--joanie