[orca-list] Evolution

[Peter Vágner <pvdeejay gmail com>]

Hello,

Currently I am on Arch Linux with Gnome 3.16, Orca master and Evolution 3.16.4.

I have just tested it briefly and I can say that for emails, this is turning into awesome experience. I have found out it is best to disable message preview, then initial sync of imap folders takes a little  while but when the messages are synced, browsing within the  message list is instantaneous and this bit alone makes it worth evaluating if not switching into Evolution in favour of Thunderbird.

When the message gets opened I assume it's divided into  individual parts such as headers, message text, signature. Depending on the message it may contain other parts. You can move between these parts and toolbar using tab or shift+tab keys. You can read text parts using normal arrow keys although cursoring is a bit funky occassionally. I can't preciselly describe the issues but the UI is verry verry responsive so I imagine after getting used into how it works it may verry well surpass Thunderbird freezing like experience. You can move over the toolbar buttons using left and right arrow keys. When exploring various toolbars toggle buttons can be activated by pressing on the spacebar and these toggle buttons usually popup additional menus with neat actions so it's worth exploring.

Typing emails works like a dream with a few exceptions:

When typing in the to, cc, bcc fields auto complete entries don't speak when you move up / down using the arrow keys. When an address or a contact is already added into such field, it can't be read with arrow keys. The same applies to the subject line.

Message body input area is working fine with a bit of funkiness the same way like I have noticed when reading emails. Sometimes a line is read twice, usually verry short lines are skipped and occassionally there may be issues reading within the last line. When backspacing first letter of a word is not read and preceeding spacebar is read by orca instead. What is positive that selecting and deselecting the text is announced by orca and working with this message compose screen is also verry verry responsive.

Message searching resembles the same functionality found in thunderbird, you can add as many advanced search conditions. Some of the controls in the advanced search dialog don't properly report their focus once tabbed into however once you know they are there you can just use arrow keys to adjust their values and it'll just work.

Evolution is verry powerfull tool with a lot of functionality so I may be able to find more nice things and / or possible issues however after this little personal subjective test I feel for emails it's verry usable and usefull after the recent development cycle. I need to play more with contacts, figure out how to use built-in spell checker and perhaps some more extra features.

Calendar is only accessible when switched into list view. Event's dates are not read. Other views such as day, week, month are either not accessible or I don't know how to use them via keyboard. In the month calendar the tab or shift+tab can't be used to jump out of the calendar widget looping over its controls. Left and right arrow keys move by day in the day view anouncing number of events within a day and one of these events however I don't know how to reach other events within that day. Moving up / down arrows makes orca announce hours and half-hours within that day with no event reporting.

I would be happy if anyone can add more Evolution tips, It would be super awesome to learn to use its calendaring features.

If these will turn to be a real issues then it would be nice to identify how big they are how likelly they are to eventually get fixed and how much interest there might be to have them fixed.

Thanks for listening

p.s. if you haven't yet tested Evolution 3.16 with orca 3.16 and up then you should do that as soon as possible.

Greetings

Peter