Re: [orca-list] State of accessibility in GNOME/Others, from an absentee

[Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com>]

The problems you are experiencing, as others have mentioned, stem
primarily from a lack of familiarity with the way GNOME 3.x works. If
you used 2.x a couple of years ago, you will be very much surprised by
the way things work now.

The first thing you'll probably want to do is to reenable your Nautilus
desktop by installing gnome-tweak-tool. The package name is the same for
both Ubuntu and Arch. Then either open gnome-tweak-tool from the run
window (alt-f2) or press alt-f1 or the super key if you have one mapped
in your VM and search for it in the activities view. Once
gnome-tweak-tool is open, press tab to go to the list of settings and
then up arrow to desktop and toggle the button that says "have file
manager handle the desktop." Once you close the tweak tool window, you
will have the desktop you are familiar with in GNOME 2.x. As others
mentioned, many of the things on the desktop are accessible from other
panels and views, but the most important thing it gives somewhat quicker
access to is the removable drives you have plugged into your machine,
which although they appear in the message tray (super-m), I still find
myself working with them on the desktop.

Since you are likely unfamiliar with the way things work now, I can give
you some tips to help out. First, alt-f1 and alt-f2 work almost the same
as they did in earlier versions of GNOME, except that alt-f1 now toggles
the activities view rather than opening a menu with applications.
Entering the activities view will indeed show a bunch of panels and
images when trying to navigate using flat review, so using flat review
here is rather painful, and seems to accomplish nothing useful. Instead,
you are immediately placed in a search box where you can find all
applications, files and even system settings related to the search you
type into the box. You can then use the arrow keys and/or the tab key to
navigate the buttons for the results. You can also experiment with
alt-control-tab here, whether or not you have typed text into the search
box, to move between different sections of the activities view. Notice
that this key sequence doesn't work in the same way your alt-tab
application switcher works, i.e. the last area that had focus is not the
area that is focused when pressing alt-control-tab. The important thing
to note here is that the first time you press alt-control-tab, you are
always taken to the same place, no matter where you were before, and
although the order of the focusable areas seems to have changed slightly
from 3.6 to 3.8, it is consistent every time, i.e. in 3.8, I always get
top bar, desktop, message tray and windows when the activities view is
closed, and dash, windows, applications, search, message tray and top
bar when the activities view is open. Yours may be slightly different,
but it will be the same for you every time you use it. Any of the menus,
buttons, etc. you find when you cycle to one of these focusable areas
can be found using the tab and arrow keys. You can also get directly to
the message tray with super-m or to the applications, similar in some
ways to the applications menu in GNOME 2.x, by pressing super-a. To
eliminate some confusion, the super key is known as the Windows key on
some keyboards, because many times it has a Microsoft Windows logo
imprinted on the key. I'm not sure what key has this functionality on a
Mac, or if there even is an equivalent, although your virtualization
software should map something. I should also note that many
applications, especially the core applications such as Nautilus, no
longer have a menu bar at the top of the window, so you don't have file,
edit, view, etc. there now. Instead, these applications have an
application menu that can be accessed by pressing super-f10. All the
other various context related menus still work as they did, i.e.
shift-f10 and the context menu key, also sometimes referred to as the
right click key, as these actions generally open the same menu.

As for alternative desktops, KDE, LXDE, XFCE and the OpenBox window
manager all work at least a little with Orca. However, the degree of
accessibility with Orca varies greatly, and none of them are as
developed as GNOME currently, with the exception of Unity2d, which can
be found on Ubuntu 12.04 and Vinux 4.0, but is not likely to be
developed further, unless it's still being worked on by Vinux
developers. I would go so far as to suggest that since you are somewhat
new to the latest desktop environments, GNOME 3.x and Unity2d are your
best possible options for now.

I hope some of this is helpful, and I wish you the best of success
running Linux again. Hopefully you will be able to get it up and running
on physical hardware soon. I leave you with this: you don't have to be a
geek to use Linux; there are very good graphical and command line tools
for geeks and non-geeks these days. The choice is yours. Enjoy freedom;
enjoy Linux!
~Kyle
http://kyle.tk/
-- 
"Kyle? ... She calls her cake, Kyle?"
Out of This World, season 2 episode 21 - "The Amazing Evie"