Orca/Magnifier Issues

[Willie Walker]

> 1)  I noticed that doing spell-checking in OpenOffice Writer while
> using ORca/Magnifier (without speech) caused OpenOffice to crash.  I
> tested the spell-checking with Orca/Magnifier disabled, and things
> seemed to go through just fine.  Are there any known problems related
> to this at this time?  If not, should I report a bug?  And are there
> any logs I should check to search for conflicts? 

Eeeks!  I'm not sure.  This sounds like a bug that should be logged with
OpenOffice, though - an application should not crash if an assistive
technology is in use.

> 2)  I wrote about this issue some time ago, but I originally thought
> it was related to the Firefox 2.0Beta2 which was out at that time.
> Upon further research, I found ti was not Firefox causing the problem.
> It seems that gnome-mag does not actively show screen content
> (scrolling in browsers, typing, etc) unless the mouse is in constant
> movement.  For example, while typing this, I do not see updated typing
> until I move my mouse--basically, when I begin typing, only the first
> letter is displayed; upon moving the mouse, everything that I typed
> then becomes visible in the magnifier.  This is also the case with
> cursors, the loading icon, and so forth.  Nothing is actively shown
> unless the mouse is constantly beign moved.  Does this seem like it
> could be a bug? 

I did a little poking around, and even if it doesn't occur in
Gnopernicus, it looks like it might be a bug in the events and character
extents are being delivered by Firefox.  I'll take a look at it as part
of our focus for Firefox 3.

> I have noticed that these problems do not occur with Gnopernicus.  I,
> however, like using Orca as my system seems to work a bit faster with
> Orca than with Gnopernicus.

I'm definitely happy you are trying out Orca.  Please keep in mind a
couple things, though:

1) Magnification in general on GNOME is not really up to par with more
modern systems.  The gnome-mag folks are working on this, but there's
still work to be done.

2) For access to the web, we are focusing on Firefox 3 for Orca.  The
internals of Firefox 3 are being rewritten for accessibility, so things
are in a bit of a flux right now.

Will