[orca-list] Some beginner questions

[Cory Samaha <csamaha86 gmail com>]

Hi there all,

I have been on this mailing list for a while, but mostly have been lurking to see what I can learn.  Aside 
from playing with Tails about a year ago, I haven’t done a whole lot of hand-on practicing with Linux of any 
flavor.  I decided about a week ago to revisit this and install Ubuntu Mate 20.04.  This seems to be what 
many people on this list prefer.  I know there are many personal preferences when it comes to choosing a 
desktop environment, but I was curious what makes many users on this list choose Mate?  I know this is a 
shoot off from Gnome, but are there advantages / disadvantages to one or the other?  I also have some 
questions and I feel bad because some of them feel like they are super beginner level, but these are some 
things I observed over using Mate for the past few days.
1. When pressing insert+h then f1 this is supposed to bring up the orca user guide in a web-like interface.  
I can navigate the document with quick navigation keys such as h for heading, k for link etc. but if I try to 
read the text of the page I am on with the arrow keys I get no feedback.  Is this something that other people 
have observed?  Am I doing something wrong?  Since I can access this document on the web I’m not too 
concerned, but was wondering why this is happening.
2.  The menu bar is popular in many applications.  I know for example, you can press alt+f which brings you 
into the file menu, but there doesn’t seem to be one key that brings focus to the menu bar.  According to the 
Ubuntu documentation you should be able to press f10 to open the first menu, though I have not had any luck 
with this (I tried this in both caga and the terminal with no results.
3.  A number of built-in Mate tools seem to either lack some accessibility, or else I have no clue what I am 
doing.  For example, today I was trying to set my time zone correctly.  I was able to get to the time zone 
settings, but all that was displayed to me was a search box to search for time zones, a time zone panel where 
Orca didn’t seem to read anything, a close button and a confirm button.  At times when I would type something 
into the search box a table for time zones would appear, but would seem to disappear if I tabbed away.  
Again, I’m not sure if this is something I’m doing wrong.  There are also lots of instances where flat review 
doesn’t provide much more information, or simply reads nothing.  I know some people have configured 
accessibility settings via config files; is this something that might help?

I am interested in getting back into some of the privacy tools offered by Tails such as Open PGP.  Has anyone 
had luck with that or similar tools?  These are just some of my findings, and I can’t tell if this is just 
because I have very limited knowledge or if these are things that Orca users are all experiencing.  I have 
not updated to the latest Orca master yet, so for now I am still running 3.36.2.  During my Linux Journey I 
don’t want to clog up this list too much, so if someone knows of a tutorial that addresses some of these 
basic questions I’m definitely willing to do my own research and listen to people who have already been 
through this process.  Any comments / suggestions are greatly appreciated.  Thank you all for this valuable 
resource.

Kind Regards,
Cory