Re: Serious accessibility issue in Gnome 2.15.

["Al Puzzuoli" <alpuzz gmail com>]

Hi all,

A few interesting findings:
The below tests were conducted on An Edgy system with latest updates as of 
Tuesday August eight:


1.  I downgraded gnome terminal, by building and installing 
gnome-terminal-2.14.2.tar.gz, as well as vte-0.12.1.tar.gz.  After 
downgrading both of these packages, I still experienced the focus issues as 
previously described.

2.  I rebuilt gaim using a tar ball of the gaim 2.0.0beta3 sources as 
downloaded from source forge about two weeks ago.  This particular instance 
of gaim worked under Dapper, and interestingly, when I built it under edgy, 
it resolved the buddy list focus issue.  Edgy is purportedly shipping the 
same version of gaim but for whatever reason, the problem occurs with the 
version that's bundled, and goes away if I rebuild from the source tar ball.

--Al



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Willie Walker" <William Walker Sun COM>
To: "Henrik Nilsen Omma" <henrik ubuntu com>
Cc: "Al Puzzuoli" <alpuzz gmail com>; "Ubuntu Accessibility Mailing List" 
<ubuntu-accessibility lists ubuntu com>; "Gnome accessibility" 
<gnome-accessibility-list gnome org>
Sent: Monday, August 07, 2006 12:06 PM
Subject: Re: Serious accessibility issue in Gnome 2.15.


> Hi All:
>
> I was finally able to do some testing with this.  I'll confirm that none
> of these are Orca bugs.  We do care, however, about the overall
> accessibility of the platform.  So, we'll dig into these problems more
> and follow up with the appropriate teams.
>
> > > 1.  Focus in gaim seems to be messed up.  I was able to create one 
> > > account,
> > > a freenode irc account.  But now, after doing that, I can never seem to
> > > bring focus back to the main buddy list window, as for whatever reason, 
> > > it
> > > doesn't seem to appear in the alt tab order.
>
> My experiences show that GAIM will come up without the buddy list and
> you need to press the gaim icon in the panel to show it.  I've tried
> various ways to get to the icon from the keyboard, but I cannot seem to
> do so (BAD for people who cannot use the mouse).  So...I resorted to
> clicking on it, which brings up a menu allowing me to show the buddy
> list.
>
> Once I was able to make the buddy list visible, I found that Orca seemed
> to do just fine with it.
>
> Note that this seems to be only with GAIM 2.0.0beta versus GAIM 1.5.1.
>
> > > 2.  Very strange things are happening in gnome terminal.  Orca tracks 
> > > live
> > > events well enough, but if I attempt to use flat review, it's all over 
> > > the
> > > place.  The read current line command seems to start at the top of the
> > > window, rather than at the last location of the cursor.  Another oddity 
> > > is
> > > that not all of the window is accessible via flat review.  in other 
> > > words,
> > > if my screen fills up with data, flat review stops before actually 
> > > reaching
> > > the last line on the screen.
>
> I found that something broke with gnome-terminal's implementation of
> getTextAtOffset: it's giving us very wrong and very incorrect values for
> GNOME 2.15.90 versus GNOME 2.14.  As such, it's difficult to know where
> text is on the screen as well as getting the text for the line where the
> cursor is.  We will dig into this more this week and file a bug with the
> appropriate component (gnome-terminal, vte, ...) when we learn more.
>
> > > 3.  Open office writer is completely inaccessible.  Orca won't even 
> > > read the
> > > menu bar or the help dialog.  If I attempt flat review, all I get is
> > > "panel".
>
> I dug into this some more, and there appears to be some binary
> incompatibility between the AT-SPI implementation used by OOo and what
> is in GNOME 2.15.90.  We've brought this to the OOo team's attention and
> will be following up more with them this week.  Note that this may or
> may not be an OOo problem (e.g., it could be an inadvertent AT-SPI
> incompatibility).
>
> Thanks!
>
> Will