A few annoying problems still with ubuntu

[Daniel Dalton]

Hi, 

I've now moved from debian to ubuntu permanently, but I'm having a
couple of annoying issues:
I'm running ubuntu 12.10 using gnome-shell (gnome 3) with everything up
to date. 

1. I'm still having a problem which I mentioned a few weeks ago where
libreoffice calc is unusable with orca. It seems when I try to use the
arrow keys to navigate the spreadsheet, the cursor moves, but orca gives
me no spoken or Braille feedback as to what is going on. 

2. In firefox (and possibly other applications, but I can only reproduce
in firefox), there are some problems with Braille. Sometimes the display
will show "screen not in text mode" and if I arrow a few lines further
this will change back to the text which is on the page. If I keep moving
through the page the screen not in text mode message continues to
reappear every few lines. 
Just reproduced this on m.facebook.com (news feed) and google.com just
now. 
Can anyone reproduce/suggest any solutions? Or is this a question for
the orca mailing list? 

3. On my debian machine the boot messages were displayed in text
mode. This meant I could start brltty early and see most of the boot
messages. In ubuntu brltty starts and then moves to say screen not in
text mode. 
I'm guessing this is because there is some type of graphical boot for
ubuntu? 
I've tried changing grub from the splash to "text", but all this seems
to do was not start the gui, which is not what I want. 
I still want to start the gui on boot, but have some type of way to
review the boot messages when booting in Braille so that if something
goes wrong I can fix my machine independently. I've also changed brltty
to start early in /etc/rcS.d/ so that brltty is at S13. Has anyone got
any ideas how I can see boot messages in Braille or at least have a way
to know that something has failed at boot time, and a way to
independently correct this? 

These are only very minor problems, and I'm really enjoying the ubuntu
experience.
If anyone has any suggestions or fixes though I'd be very grateful. 

Keep up the good work.

Thanks in advance. 
Daniel