Re: [orca-list] If you are using Mate with Braille please contact me.

[Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs igalia com>]

+ Orca-list for MATE folks.

Hey Tom.

Thanks! Here's the relevant part of your debug.out (with timestamps and 
"INFO:" trimmed for readability and extra space added to group the 
checks together):

Looking at [window | ] from [application | marco] marco
[window | ] lacks state active
[window | ] is not active and showing, or is iconified

Looking at [frame | Top Panel] from [application | mate-panel] mate-panel
[frame | Top Panel] lacks state active
[frame | Top Panel] is not active and showing, or is iconified

Looking at [frame | Bottom Panel] from [application | mate-panel] 
mate-panel
[frame | Bottom Panel] lacks state active
[frame | Bottom Panel] is not active and showing, or is iconified

Looking at [frame | Desktop] from [application | caja] /usr/bin/caja
[frame | Desktop] lacks state active
[frame | Desktop] is not active and showing, or is iconified

Unable to find active window from [list of all applications, even those 
which don't have any windows, e.g. Orca, mate-settings-daemon, etc.]

So... The question is what -- if anything -- are you in or has focus? My 
guess is that it's safe to eliminate the top and bottom panels. And if 
memory serves me the window from Marco is what you wind up in when you 
use Alt+Tab. So you're not in that. The only candidate is the Desktop.

You can do a functional test to see if the Desktop is active by putting 
some files in $HOME/Desktop. Then, when you start up and Orca just says 
"Screen reader on," press navigation keys which should work on the 
Desktop like Home, End, Left, Right, Up, Down. If one of those keys 
causes the selected/focused item to change, then that's where focus is. 
In which case, the MATE folks should see about adding the "active" state 
to accessible state set of the Desktop frame. Then Orca should tell you 
you're on the Desktop and if it finds a focused icon, present that as well.

On the other hand, if pressing those keys doesn't work without your 
having first explicitly given focus to the Desktop, then I suspect that 
when you start up your session, absolutely nothing has focus and you are 
not physically in any window. Thus Orca has nothing to present as the 
active window or focused item. If this is indeed the case, perhaps the 
MATE folks could consider putting focus *somewhere*, like the Desktop, 
for all users.

Related aside: Orca used to say "no focus" to indicate that condition, 
but doing so reliably was problematic: There are often very brief 
moments where one is in limbo between a window becoming inactive and a 
window becoming active. If Orca doesn't wait a sufficiently long enough 
time, Orca would be regularly spamming you with "no focus" messages. On 
the flip side, if Orca waits too long to tell you nothing has focus, 
you've probably already reached this conclusion due to the silence and 
caused something to gain focus rendering the eventual "no focus" message 
pointless. I had tried to strike a balance in between these two 
extremes, but "no focus" messages still crept through on occasion and 
users complained. So the "no focus" message got removed.

I'm dealing with some Chromium issues at the moment, but I'm hoping the 
MATE users -- and in some cases MATE contributors, like Hypra -- will 
read the above and either fix the missing state (if the Desktop really 
is active) or see about causing the Desktop to gain focus or clue me in 
to something I'm not aware of. :)

Thanks!!
--joanie

On 4/30/20 14:44, Tom Masterson wrote:
> Hi Joanie
>
> Here is a debug with orca starting.  Not a high priority as I can easily 
> work around it but might be interesting to know why orca says nothing 
> but "screenreader on" until I go to the menu.
>
> Tom
>
> On Thu, 30 Apr 2020, Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
>
> > Hey Tom.
> >
> > When Orca is first started, it tries to find the active application 
> > window. If it finds it, it should present it. Also if it finds it, it 
> > then searches for the focused object in that window. So my guess is 
> > that Orca is not finding an active window. If you care as to why, 
> > capturing a full debug.out would be helpful. I'm happy to take a look.
> >
> > If the scenario is that Orca is being started automatically along with 
> > the desktop, the approach of relaunching Orca and cycling through 
> > levels presumably won't work. But on 
> > https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca/Debugging, under item 2, you'll 
> > find something which should work, namely using orca-customizations.py 
> > to set up the file and debug level
> > ahead of time.
> >
> > HTH.
> > --joanie