Re: [orca-list] intro and observations on Archlinux/Mate

[Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com>]

I have a laptop with 512MB RAM and an older Sempron processor I believe
around 2GHz, but I need to check it again to be sure of the processor
speed. It runs MATE perfectly. I also have an even older Dell Optiplex,
one of those large-ish ones from about 2003 or 2004 with a Pentium IV
running at 2GHZ, and upgraded from 512MB RAM to 1GB. It also boots up
very fast and runs MATE in a much more snappy way than I would expect. I
also have it running on an HP box that is very similar in specs to
yours, So your box is definitely beefy enough to run MATE with no
trouble at all.

Your specific problem is some kind of bug in Thunderbird's interaction
with Orca. I'll explain it a little here, but I'll be sending in a more
detailed report complete with a debug.out in a separate thread.
Essentially, what is happening is that occasionally, Thunderbird is
losing speech, usually while reading a message, but it also happens when
composing a message. It seems that the recent focus mode fixes in Gecko
applications has somewhat reduced the occurrance of this problem when
composing a message, but it is still there. The problem is that it seems
to happen at random. When composing a message, my work-around has been
to attempt to close the message and then just cancel the save window.
Your best options if Thunderbird freezes while reading a message are to
either close the message and reopen it or to restart Orca. If it happens
in the message list, I've been able to move to the folder tree using
shift+tab, move down to the next folder, move back up and then tab back
into the message list. Otherwise, restarting Orca also helps there. As I
said, I will either send a detailed report in a separate thread, or I'll
put it in the bug tracker. I will note here however that Thunderbird
24.0 may not help much, as it does have the message list sync issue. My
work-around for that was to go to the folder list, move to another
folder, come back to the folder I was working in and go back to the
message list every time I deleted a message, but the upgrade certainly
made my workflow easier in spite of the occasional loss of speech. That
said, I was able to delete messages in a sort of batch operation by
using the shifted arrow keys to select all the consecutive messages I
wished to delete, deleting them all at once and then doing my little
work-around, which caused me to have to do the work-around slightly less
often. Hope all this helps a little, and of course, welcome to the list.
~Kyle
http://kyle.tk/
-- 
"Kyle? ... She calls her cake, Kyle?"
Out of This World, season 2 episode 21 - "The Amazing Evie"