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

[Tom Masterson <kd7cyu gmail com>]

My desktop has plenty of files and orca does not respond to any keys so I 
would surmise that nothing has focus.  I know alt-tab does nothing in my 
case at least as far as orca is concerned.

Tom


On Thu, 30 Apr 2020, Joanmarie Diggs wrote:

> + 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