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Re: [orca-list] Tips and tricks for Orca and Firefox

Hello Joanie,
now as you're saying it, the automatic switching during navigation seems to be really happening only when pressing tab. The fact that it usually always surprises me is probably caused by my quite frequent use of tabulator, infact, I would personally call it a structural navigation too, although it is probably better to have it separated in this way for practical reasons.
As for the disabling of autofocus, I would like to disable this functionality completely, so Orca doesn't switch between modes under any circumstances, even after page load or refresh. The problem with automatic focusing is, that it's quite unpredictable, in all screenreaders. On some sites it works, on some not, and because many times I don't even want to write anything, I often find myself in fight with switching of modes before I'm able to do what I want. As I said, this is not just problem of Orca, but also Jaws, NVDA and other screenreaders, that's the reason why I usually turn auto focusing completely off.
Pressing two shortcuts to manually target and focus an edit field requires almost no time, when I can be sure, that it will work as expected. Checking whether an unreliable mechanism did what it was supposed to do is without sight a much more expensive process. 


Best regards


Rastislav


Dňa 15. 8. 2020 o 13:35 Joanmarie Diggs napísal(a):

Hi Rastislav.

By default, automatic focus mode is disabled for both caret navigation
and structural navigation. That can be changed in the app-specific
preferences dialog. So are you also asking for it to be disabled when
you do things like Tab? Or are you saying that Orca is switching into
focus mode during caret navigation and/or structural navigation even
though you have those settings disabled?

--joanie

On Sat, 2020-08-15 at 00:42 +0200, Rastislav Kish via orca-list wrote:

Hello,

Orca shortcuts work quite reliably, infact, I don't remember seeing
one
to fail.

The problem is, that Orca doesn't allow, or at least i didn't find a
way, how to turn off the automatic focus mode. I was always turning
it
off on Windows where possible, and this feature would be great on
Linux
as well, because the two modes are too different from each other to
be
switched by automated mechanism.

The fact, that this is actually happening then leads to exactly
those
situations, that navigation keys seemingly don't work, but in
reality,
one is just stuck in focus mode.


But otherwise, reactions are very good, just today I switched for a
while to Windows to set up some things there and perform some
research
tasks, and I was truly amazed, how slow is FF on Win.


Youtube in my case works without any problems, the video can be
controlled with j, k and l keys, of course after pressing
orca+backspace.

I usually approach the controls either from the top by pressing b
about
10 times, or by firstly targeting the search edit field and then
pressing b about 5 times. The same approach as on Win.


And besides already mentioned tricks, I will add, that you can read
answers to comments by tabbing through names instead of moving by
pressing down arrow.

i.e. you hit show x answers under a comment, and then tab until you
find
an author's name, pres down arrow to read the answer, tab again to
get
to another author's name, again read the answer with down arrow, etc.


This way, you can read the answers quite confortably, Orca normally
skips this region for some reason.


Best regards


Rastislav


Dňa 14. 8. 2020 o 22:56 Jeanette C. via orca-list napísal(a):

Hey hey,
thank you for your detailed reply. As regards the specifics to
youtube, this is very helpful and might improve the operation
greatly.
I did see (almost) all the keyboard commands, but found that
sometimes
they didn't work, even though I knew that there had to be buttons,
b
wouldn't do anything. I can't yet say how to reproduce this
(mis)behaviour though.

Regarding hotkeys/keyboard controls defined by a website: how well
do
these work with Orca? I'm sure they won't work in Browse mmode. How
do
you deal with that? Just switch modes whenever you need a web
shortcut?

Would you have a tip for getting a good overview of the whole
Firefox
application, i.e. a structural representation of elements within
the
program (tabs, toolbars, attached windows, etc..)?

Best wishes and thanks for the tips,

Jeanette

Aug 14 2020, Mewtamer has written:


Personally, YouTube isn't the most screen reader friendly website
out
there. Lots of extraneous buttons that make getting to the
controls of
the active video harder than it should be, comments are a mess
with
lots of hidden text and lots of controls that are hard to skip
for
seamless reading, there's a trick to even locating the comments
section of a video page... and at least on my system, even with
YouTube videos at 100%, I have to bump up my system volume to the
point Orca is screaming my ears to hear most videos.

That said, some tips for making the most of YouTube's not very
accessible interface:

On a video page, the title is a level 1 heading, cthe comments
start
with a level 2 heading, and the links to suggested videos are
level 3
headings. When Orca is in browse mode, pressing the h key will
jump to
the next heading indiscriminately, and using the number row 1-6
will
jump to headings at specific levels. Like with other Orca
navigational
hotkeys, you can use shift+ the hotkey to jump backwards and
alt+shift+hotkey to bring up a list of elements of the given
type.

The video controls on a YouTube video page are right above the
Level 1
heading with the Video's title and the controls for favoriting,
adding
to personal playlists, and information on the video are below
this
heading. If you press b on the keyboard when you first load a
video
page, sometimes this will put focus on the play button, but
sometimes
there will be several buttons from YouTube's top navigation to
cycle
through first. From the play button, shitf+tab will bring you to
the
progress slider and then the skip add button when available and
tabbing will bring you to the next button and then the volume
slider.
There are other controls, but these are the ones I use most.

In addition to H for headings, 1-6 on the number row for specific
level headings, and b for buttons, some other navigational
hotkeys I
find useful include:

A for JavaScript clickables(alt+shift+a to bring up the list of
all
such elements is particularly useful here since these often don't
respond to keyboard input and selecting one from the list and
tabbing
a few times to the activate button is often the easiest way to
activate these controls)
C for comboboxes
e for text entry(note that you'll need to use Orca+a to switch to
focus mode if you actually want to type in one)
g for graphics
i for list items
l for lists
q for block quotes
r for radio buttons
s for separators
t for tables
x for check boxes.

I think k, u, and v also jump to links, unvisited links, and
visited
links respectively, but I've never found them that useful.

Naturally, which, if any of the above navigational hotkeys are
useful
varies greatly from site to site, though I find using h to cycle
through the headings is often a good first step when orienting
myself
to an unfamiliar website.


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