[orca-list] Your opinion regarding caret control in Gecko

[Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs igalia com>]

Hey all.

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that heuristically trying to
identify when Orca should control the caret and when Orca should not
(e.g. in ARIA apps, form fields, etc.) is the source of quite a few bugs
-- and it doesn't help performance because each time you arrow, Orca
needs to do work to determine if it is handling things or not.

As a result, here's what I'm thinking/wondering: What if Orca always
controls the caret when that setting is enabled? This would be somewhat
like forms mode: When you want to interact with a form control -- or an
ARIA app -- using the arrow keys, you would turn off caret navigation by
pressing Orca + F12. When you wanted to move around in the text, you
would turn on caret navigation by pressing Orca + F12. Orca would stop
doing this automatically.

The biggest con I see is that the user needs to know what he or she is
in and that this needs to be toggled. The pros are that it, along with
some additional changes, should make it possible for you to arrow to
anything and it would be more performant. And bugs like the problems Al
reported would be eliminated entirely.

Please let me know what you think.
--joanie