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

[Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs igalia com>]

Sorry for being spammy. But in addition to the full debug.out, have you
tried using upstream Orca? (i.e. completely removing whatever Ubuntu is
shipping?) Orca's settings are not in dconf or gsettings or anything
else other than the files in $HOME/.local/share/orca. If the package
maintainers downstream have rolled their own alternative settings and
introduced associated bugs there might not be anything I can do upstream.
--joanie

On 03/20/2018 01:18 PM, kendell clark wrote:
> 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