Re: [orca-list] Some questions for Orca master version related

[Joanmarie Diggs <joanied gnome org>]

Hi Attila, all.

> My questions:
> 1. What functions are supporting with gnome-shell mag? Have similar 
> magnification related preferences with Orca prewious supported?

Two things on this point:

1. gnome-mag (now deprecated and found on far fewer distros) supported 
   more preferences than gnome-shell mag does. As a result, while we had
   a bunch of preferences on the magnifier page, a number of them did
   nothing.
2. Joseph (gnome-shell mag developer) has been working on the 
   implementation of a configuring gui for gnome-shell mag which will
   be made available via the universal access preferences in 
   gnome-shell.

Which is a long way of saying the Orca's mag preferences were both
seriously outdated and are about to become redundant. Thus I removed
them.

> 2. Gnome-shell mag is possible using with GNOME3 fallback mode?

Nope. But gnome-mag is deprecated and really is not going to be an
option either. What *might* be an option, though I haven't tried it, is
Compiz eZoom.

Also note that I've started pushing fixes to the stable, gnome-3-0
branch of Orca and figured I'd just get in the habit of doing three
releases on release days. As a result, if there are any folks out there
in the situation where they must use both Orca and gnome-mag in fallback
mode -- assuming this is even possible -- they can use the gnome-3-0
branch of Orca (even in GNOME 3.2).

> 3. Because lot of other preferences is removed in Orca GUI preferences 
> dialog, future will be have two help page: one for master/3.2 branch and 
> one for orca-xdesktop branch?

Define "page". If you mean web page, probably not. Because I believe
those get autogenerated from "official"/"valid" branches. However, keep
in mind the following:

1. As with gnome-shell mag, work is taking place to make Compiz eZoom 
   perform caret and focus tracking. Once that work is complete, users
   of gnome 2.x as well as other non-GNOME3 environments will have a
   magnification option that does not require Orca to control it (and
   one which works way better than gnome-mag). At that point, I'll be
   removing the magnification preferences and functionality from the
   orca-xdesktop branch as well.

2. I'm trying really hard to keep the docs in sync between the two 
   branches now because we have a bunch of documentation, and because
   I've asked the i18n team to please try to do translations for both
   master and orca-xdesktop (in addition to the continued work they are
   doing on the gnome-3-0 branch). In other words, I'm already asking a
   lot of a volunteer team -- something arguably I have no right to ask
   of them. And yet the team is helping us all out by doing so. i18n 
   team really is the best team ever! Anyhoo.... Keeping the docs in 
   sync means that it's easier for i18n folks to push changes to 
   multiple branches. So I'm waiting for the eZoom work to be completed.
   Then I will remove the gnome-mag support and configuration from Orca.
   And once that is done, I'll update the docs for both orca-xdesktop 
   and the master branch.

In summary, what the overarching goal is boils down to is: Most
magnification users do not need a screen reader. Most screen reader
users do not need magnification. Therefore, the magnification solutions
should provide their own caret and focus tracking, along with a
configuration GUI. Orca should not be doing anything magnification
related. And for those few users who need speech and/or braille *and*
magnification, Orca's job is to work well with magnifiers, in other
words not do anything which makes it hard or impossible for magnifiers
to do the right thing if Orca is being used.

Make sense?
--joanie