Re: [orca-list] Firefox text fields

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

Ginn Chen <ginn chen oracle com> wrote:
 
> Sorry, I was wrong.
> The atk-adapter will translate text_insert and text_remove to text-changed:insert and text-changed:delete.
>
> The real problem is Firefox wrongly added ::system suffix to the text changed events while typing in 
> textfield.
> The new version of Orca will ignore these events.
> That is a Firefox bug.
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686909

Thank you for the reference to the bug report.

Here's the situation, based on the bug report as I read it.

The bug is two months old and was properly reported with a test case.

It isn't assigned to anyone and there's no proposed patch.

The consequences are rather serious for users, i.e., no braille/spoken
feedback of text typed into text fields.

Firefox 9 is scheduled to be released in December:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases#Firefox_9
and unless someone moves in a hurry, no fix will make it into the release (in
fact, this might be ruled out already depending on how the development process
works).

I'm not sure what the average time is in the Mozilla project taken for a bug
which is considered important to be fixed, so I won't comment here, positively
or negatively - I'm just summarizing the facts as they appear to be.

If my memory is correct, as a point of comparison, regressions reported in the
Linux kernel are fixed, on average,  within a month - but the kernel has a
very large number of contributors, more than Mozilla, so the comparison
probably isn't fair.

I think there is a need to find more contributors to work in this area, as is
usually the case with such projects. Whether there's a problem of
communication and prioritization of bugs is another question, and I expect
that's more easily fixed, if it exists, than the problem of finding new contributors.