My observations on 11.10's accessibility

[Jacob Schmude]

Hi all,
Well, after a bit of playing around, I did get Ubuntu Oneiric to 
install. On my machine, I had to press ctrl+s regularly throughout the 
boot-up process. This was the only way I got the drums to play, 
otherwise, it would go straight to the Unity-3D environment without 
giving me the chance to enable the accessible installer. The machine, if 
it makes a difference, is a Samsung NF310 netbook. After playing with it 
for most of the day, I've some observations, both positive and negative, 
that I'd like to note.
First off, let me say that I've enabled the proposed updates repository 
and updated before I started using Oneiric.

** Desktop environment
1. The toggle screen reader key is not enabled by default. I really 
believe this should be set, if not globally, than at least when an 
accessible install is done. There seems to be no way to reliably force 
Orca to load on login, so setting such a shortcut would be of great help.
2. Many menu items in the application menu (the new global Unity menu 
bar) read as check items when they are not, and those that are often 
incorrectly report their status. Also, the top menu bar items read as 
"label" rather than as a menu item. The check item issue is, imho, more 
important than the misreading of the label role, as it sometimes reports 
incorrect status. This bug bleeds over into all applications that 
integrate with the global menu bar.
3. The QT support works very well. An excellent job on that one, this is 
a landmark in accessibility for us.
4. Some status menu items, such as the battery, read as simply "image." 
Does anyone have a reliable way to check the battery status without 
going into a terminal, since this icon doesn't read?
5. Privilege escalation is working properly. Excellent.

** Mozilla (Firefox and Thunderbird)
1. Internal frames on some web pages seem to cause Orca to say "grayed" 
until you arrow past them. This makes reading of these frames difficult 
and, if one is not careful, tabbing around too quickly in these areas 
will cause Firefox to lock up. Anyone else see this?
2. Firefox's pop-up messages, such as that when you install a new add-on 
and need to restart, seem to cause a complete inability to move focus 
via the keyboard save for using Orca's mouse click features. This 
doesn't seem to happen all the time, and I've not found a pattern to it. 
This seems to be a new problem, as I don't recall having this issue when 
using Firefox with Orca in GNOME 2.
3. Thunderbird seems to be remarkably unstable. It's responsive when it 
works, but often when deleting messages it will crash on me without warning.
4. Both mozilla products are more responsive than they were in GNOME 2, 
a huge positive.

** Others
1. What happened to Orca's ability to automatically read Empathy? Not 
only are the chat features to read prior messages and automatically 
speak incoming messages absent, but the contact list doesn't read 
properly once I arrow down past the first three items or so. The focus 
moves, but Orca doesn't say anything. Arrowing up back to the first 
three items will cause them to speak, but nothing I do will get the 
items below it to read when this happens. I've not found a pattern to it 
but, when it does, a restart of Empathy is needed before the contact 
list will read again. I'd rather not have to use Pidgin, but I might 
need to do so until this gets fixed.
2. Is there a way to get Orca to come up at the login screen without 
having to switch display managers?
3. What are the lenses in the dash supposed to do? When I switch between 
them, Orca doesn't say anything and nothing different seems to appear. 
The dash looks and behaves the same no matter what lense I seem to have 
selected.

That's all for now. Anyone confirm some of these issues? A great job 
over all, and congrats to the Ubuntu devs for this. We're not quite 
there yet, but I'd say we're closer to having a fully accessible Linux 
desktop than we've ever been before, and another version or two might 
just put Ubuntu up there with OS X for built-in access.

Thanks

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