[orca-list] extremely exasperated with orca 3.27 and ubuntu mate 18.04

[kendell clark <coffeekingms gmail com>]

hi all

I'm going to try to make this message simple to reproduce. I am having 
the following issues with orca

Frequent freezes or out right crashes every minute and a half, two 
minutes maximum after the desktop is loaded. Usually orca will stabilize 
and begin working normally, but when this happens is completely random. 
Because of this, steps to reproduce are going to be difficult, but I'm 
going to try my best.Steps to reproduce

Start ub ubuntu mate 18.04. A flash drive should do fine. Orca will 
start up after altwin+s is pressed. It will say "screen reader on" 
followed by nothing. After about 30 seconds, sometimes a minute, orca 
will either function normally, in other words say "desktop frame" and 
you can use the computer normally, or it will continue to do nothing 
until toggled. When toggled, orca will say "screenn reader off. Followed 
by a pause of about five seconds, followed by screen reader settings 
reloaded. If toggled again right after this, orca will occasionally see 
the desktop and you can use the computer normally. Otherwise, it will 
then say "screen reader off" and it will need to be toggled again. Once 
orca does see the desktop, it frequently stops responding after a caja 
window is opened at a folder, which exact folder doesn't matter. Orca 
doesn't usually turn off when it messes up, it just stops reading all 
applications including the desktop, but so far as I can see runs 
normally. You can toggle it, and it will come back, only to have that 
same 30 second to a minute and a half delay until it sees the desktop, 
only to then freeze again ... rince and repeat. This is beyond 
exasperating. I've reset my dconf settings at least five times, which 
fixes the problem, temporarily, but it always comes back. I suspect a 
debug log will show nothing, therefore people will be unable to see the 
problem, but I can testify absolutely that there is a problem somewhere. 
I want to try and help get this problem fixed. If a debug log will be 
useful I'll gladly provide one. Downgrading to orca 3.26 fixes the 
majority of these problems, so it's got to be something in newer 
software, but beyond that I'm clueless. I don't mean to sound so 
frustrated, but requiring an orca restart every couple of minutes when 
I'm trying to get work done is just ... agrivating.

 I don't expect instantaneous performance from orca by any means, but 
even when orca works normally, performance is generally sluggish. Typing 
text into caa's location bar to complete file names works but will often 
trip up orca, causing it to stop reading but otherwise function 
normally. Navigation around the desktop is noticeably laggy, taking a 
couple of seconds from key press to response. This is with using the 
espeak ng speech synthesizer on a vizio ultrabook with 8 gb of ram, an 
intel quad core processor, model number i3-3217U, an ssd with 250 gb of 
storage, running ubuntu mate 18.04, bionic beaver, all updates 
installed, including proposed updates.

Thanks

Kendell Clark


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