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[orca-list] Eclipse quickstart with orca (was: Re: Focus issues when debugging in Eclipse)

Hi all,

i decided to write a quickstart guide how to use Eclipse with Orca.
Not quite sure what would be a good place to publish such information
but i thought there might be some interessted users in here...
I'd tried to add it to the gnome wiki too, but they want me to enter a
chapca.. But well thats another story, i'll write them and see what we
can do.

So here are a fiew lines about setting up and using Eclipse with orca.
Feel free to contact me for any improovements or questions etc.

---

Using Eclipse with Orca

This short article should give you a quickstart guide to setup eclipse
and use it for Java programming with Orca.

Versions:

As i am writing this the current versions i'm using are:
Orca 3.12
Gnome 3.12
Eclipse Luna (aka. 4.4.2) Linux Gtk X86_64
Java: Oracle Jdk 1.8.0

Setting up Eclipse:

There are no special steps required to setup eclipse in order to
improove things for Orca. Just download the wanted brand of Eclipse,
extract it to your favorite location (e.g. /home/<user>/bin/eclipse/)
and if you like create a desktop shortcut to the executable eclipse
file. Personally i prefer to have such shortcuts.

If you startup Eclipse the first time a window will appear asking you
for the default workspace location. I prefer to have my workspace(s)
grouped in /home/jann/.eclipse/workspaces/. So if i for example want
to use a workspace named "plugindev" i would append it so it would be
/home/jann/.eclipse/workspaces/plugindev/
There is an option to browse for the folder but well, it is just handy
to write a new location into the text field an let Eclipse generate
the folder if it doesn't exist allready. The dialog also has a
checkbox asking if you would like to use this as the default. Depends
on your needs - if unsure leave it not checked, the most recent
workspace will be preselected at the next startup anyway.

After selecting your workspace just continue to startup eclipse,
simply press enter. It might take a while until the main Eclipse
window comes up. When Eclipse finished starting up the first time Orca
will announce the window title (which depends on your settings).

Suggested adjustments after installing eclipse:

Well after installing and running it the first time there are a fiew
things you might want to adjust in order to simplify working with
Eclipse using orca.

Get rid of the welcome screen:

When starting up Eclipse the first time it will present an welcome
screen which is not very accessible. Also this complicates navigating
the other windows so i suggest to close it. To do that press Alt +
Shift + dash "-" to get the child window menu. Press cursor down to
get to the "close" menu entry and press enter.
NOTE: This window will also re-appear if you install new features. You
will have to close it again. So if you find yourselve in the situation
that orca doesn't read any editors content after restarting eclipse
due to software installation, thats what you might have run into..
Just try to close this window and orca should be happy again.

Turning of quickdiff:

If quickdiff is enabled and your project is connected to a VCS like
Git you might get strange effects when saving your changes. The editor
somehow presents the differences of the current source and the head
revision and orca might get confused by this. So i suggest to disable
quickdiff. Goto the window menu, press up to get to the preferences
menu entry and enter to open it. There is a text field where you can
type to start searching for settings. The wanted one is in the teams
section i think. Just search for it works very nice.

Enable colors:


I prefer to see some of the markup in the java editors on the braille
device. Select the desired text attributes in the orca -> application
specific menu.

Navigating and basic overview:

Generally spoken my experiences with Eclipses accessibility are quite
good. One fact might be that eclipse uses SWT which is accessible. Of
course there are some very specialized views and editors which are not
accessible but thats expected (i think) as there are more than 200
Plugins available ...
Eclipse is made up of so called editors and views. Editors may be any
kind of gui to edit an object. For example there are a Java editor,
properties editor, Xml editor but also more abstract ones to edit
models and stuff (not very useful for blind people anyway).
Views just present information and let you navigate through it. So
there are for example views like the package explorer, a team (scm)
synchronize view or similar.
All this views and editors make up a perspective. You can put on your
perspective whatever you prefer  by selecting it for example via the
window menu -> show view ...

A very common pattern in eclipse is to present properties using trees
in views. You can navigate these trees as usual. Press enter to open
an entry and Shift + cursor left to close it.

Here are some basic shortcuts to switch editors and views etc.:

Ctrl + Shift + L = THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE :-) list all shortcuts
Ctrl + F6 = next editor
Ctrl + Shift + F6 = previous editor
Ctrl + F7 = next view
Ctrl + Shift + F7 = previous view
Ctrl E = list of open editors with an input field (a CCombo i think)
Shift + F10 = Context menu as usual
Ctrl + F10 = additional menu available in views

Replacement for the status bar:

I never got the status bar accessible on my eclipse installations. But
there is another view called "progress view" you can use to see whats
going on. This is useful if you have to wait for "building workspace"
or "maven resolve" or such tasks. Otherwise you might wonder why
things get sluggish and well the status bar doesn't provide much
useful info for us. Just goto window -> show view -> down to the
progress bar. If it doesn't appear in the list go down to "other",
press enter and you will get all available views as a tree. You can
filter this with the provided text field the focus will be put in
automatically.

Some shortcuts for working with Java editors and stuff:

F3 on an element name will take you to its definition. Or on a method
call it will also take you to its definition (if the sources are
available of course).
Use Ctrl + T to get a popup displaying the hierarchie. Inside it you
can navigate using the up and down cursor keys and press enter on an
element to get to its editor.

Another very handy feature is to display the current object your are
at in the editor in another view. You might want to see it for example
in the git repository or the package explorer etc. Press Alt + Shift +
W to get the "Show in" menu. Navigate up and down and select the
wanted view.

To get the Outline press Ctrl + O. You will get a popup again with a
text field at the top where you can start writing to filter things.
But as with the hierarchie view you also might just navigate down to
the element you want to edit and press enter to get to the editor.

The javadoc of an element can be displayed by pressing F2. To make the
view accessible i suggest to change the browser from the "internal
one" to your firefox. You can do that in the java preferences.

When working with Java you also might want to use Git or Subversion or
such things. I prefer to use these tools from the command line.
Merging and diffing and stuff are accessible maybe but i can't write
about that because i'm just used to do this via cli..
---

Regards Jann!

2015-03-18 21:04 GMT+01:00, B. Henry <burt1iband gmail com>:

Thank you very much.
I will be explaining what ever you write/send me to my friend as he does not
speak English, and perhaps I can thenmake a Spanish translation of the
article that could go up on the Wiki as well.
  Looking forward to hearing from you/reading the article.



--
     B.H.
   Registerd Linux User 521886


  Jann Schneider wrote:
Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 08:55:02PM +0100


Hi!

i'd be glad if i could help a bit with Eclipse. Well i wrote an
article on the old orca wiki about this stuff but this is quite old.
So i decided to write a new one.. I'm working with Java and Eclipse on
a daily basis and hope that some hints might be helpful. I don't know
too much about the special fiew tomcat specific things but will
conncentrate on the general setup and usage.
I'm going to send it to you later on when i finished it.

Regards Jann!


2015-03-18 18:46 GMT+01:00, B. Henry <burt1iband gmail com>:


Hey Jan,
I am trying to help a blind friend get up to speed with the Linux tools
he
needs for his University work, a lot of which is learning about JAVA.
I know he needs eclypse/will be working with tomcat...
I know 0 about java programming or its use in web-servers, and have
never
installed eclypse myself. I do have a lot of experience with using
accessible
Linux, both GUI and CLI which I am trying to share to get my friend up
to
speed asap.
Any tips or tricks? I have ignored eclypse threads on the orca list as
I
never used the software in question/do not have time for everything, so
if I

missed something sorry/feel free to send me to list archives if there is
a
lot to learn there. Otherwise a few lines on how to get started with
eclypse,
or what to expect to work poorly with orca would be greatly
appreciated.
Regards from Oaxaca, Mexico,


--
     B.H.
   Registerd Linux User 521886


  Jann Schneider wrote:
Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 11:21:59AM +0100


Hello,

Maybe some of you know the disturbing behaviour in eclipse: if
debugging a Java application or PDE plugin the focus will be auto-put
to the debug view no matter where it is (usually in the editor).
I believe this is not caused by orca! But maybe it is related to
enabled AT (which i don't believe too). I just wanted to post to this
list in order to get some feedback if anyone using orca and Eclipse
(4.4.x) could confirm this.
If so would you mind to add the information about your setup to the
bug i created for that? {1} The interessting things would be Eclipse
version, orca version, Gnome version, and maybe platform, too. I'm
just looking for a pattern to consistently reproduce this in order to
get a chance to fix it..

Thanks in advance!

regards Jann!

{1} https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=461684
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