[orca-list] Thunderbird 5 accessibility issues

[Nolan Darilek <nolan thewordnerd info>]

Ugh, seems like every new version of a Mozilla product regresses some in 
accessibility, at least under Orca. Sorry to be negative about it but 
there it is.

I'm trying to install a Thunderbird extension that I've downloaded 
separately, as it doesn't seem to exist on mozilla.org. Is there no 
longer an Install button in the addon manager, or is it now 
inaccessible? There seem to be some issues with this interface involving 
controls appearing or disappearing for no reason I can determine. In 
particular, sometimes when tabbing through I get a set of radio buttons 
which I presume lets me enable automatic updates, sometimes I don't, but 
either way these buttons don't respond to keypresses.

Is the author of a message no longer displayed when scrolling through, 
or is it displayed but just not accessible?

These aren't huge issues, but it'd be nice if newer versions of a 
product fixed existing bugs rather than added new ones. I'm getting some 
new hangs in Firefox 5, for instance, that resemble some of the old 
accessibility freezes we used to get with Orca quite often. The desktop 
freezes, becomes entirely unresponsive, my CPU fan spins madly, and the 
only way to get Orca or anything else back is to killall -KILL 
firefox-bin. And that might be OK if some other accessibility issues 
were resolved, but I'm not finding any just yet. Wondering if ChromeVox 
might be a workable solution. I'm planning on trying that later this 
week, that might eliminate the pain point of being stuck with one 
browser which is a bit of a web access bottleneck if it doesn't let you 
click on some links or presents something inaccurately.

Thanks.