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

[Jean-Philippe MENGUAL <texou actux eu org>]

Hi,

Thanks Kyle for this excellent message, from which I'll explore in details
gnome-shell. Anyway I tested orca 3.4 and 3.7 in various circumstances
(Wheezy, Sonar), and I experience a problem I wanted to share: when I lock
the numpad to write figures, any orca shortcut is locked too. On Firefox, I
cannot browse a page with arrow keys. Ins-t doesn't work anymore. To recover
the shortcuts, I've to press unlock numpad.

Is qhis problem known? fixed in 3.8? etc.?

Regards,

On vendredi 21 juin 2013 à 13:04:07 (-0400), Kyle wrote:
> 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"
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