Re: [orca-list] at-spi2 and orca some problems!

[Mike Gorse <mgorse alum wpi edu>]

Halim et al,

These seem like caching issues--as discussed on g-a-devel, AT-SPI 2 caches 
more aggressively than AT-SPI 1 and expects toolkits to send events when 
an object's properties/states/children change.  This means that, if a 
toolkit sometimes doesn't send these events, then AT-SPI2 will feed 
outdated information to Orca where AT-SPI 1 would have made a call to the 
application to fetch the needed information on the fly.  I had intended 
for there to be an API to allow an AT such as Orca to determine what 
information would be cached per-application, but there were several 
problems with it.  I've just pushed some changes to at-spi2-core that 
should improve things, and the fixes will be in tomorrow's release.

I think that bugs should be filed against applications/toolkits that do 
not send events when an accessible's name/state/hierarchy changes. 
However, it makes sense to allow an Orca script to work around these kinds 
of issues by disabling certain types of caching.

If I put the following block in the Thunderbird script's __init__ 
function, then I don't see the problem with the "inbox" label not being 
refreshed:

        try:
            app.setCacheMask(pyatspi.cache.ALL ^ pyatspi.cache.NAME)
        except:
            pass

This tells at-spi to cache everything for the application except for the 
names of accessibles.  STATES, PARENT, CHILDREN, etc. can be substituted 
for NAME or excluded in addition to it, and NONE will disable all caching 
(see atspi-constants.h).  Note that this requires an up-to-date check-out 
of at-spi2-core.

Hth,
-Mike

On Fri, 20 May 2011, Halim Sahin wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am not sure if the following problems were already diskused here.
>
> I am currently using gnome-2.32 orca from git master and at-spi2* from
> git.
>
> When I press ctrl+alt+d for desktop, orca says always not selected when
> navigating through my desktop icons using the cursor keys.
>
> Another problem occours when using empathy.
> In the past orca could read the latest information of the empathy icon
> in top panel.
> Now with at-spi2 the info doesn't get updated. Orca reads always the
> initial vallue when pressing ctrl+f1.
>
> I am not sure if there errors are related in orca or at-spi2.
> It would be nice to file bugs in right place :-).
> Thx
> Halim
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