GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 546355
The ARIA gmail interface is largely unusable with Orca
Last modified: 2009-03-10 00:05:33 UTC
Currently Orca's interaction with the ARIA-enhanced gmail interface is wretched. We need to do a thorough analysis and open new, specific bugs which can be addressed in a reasonable and timely fashion. In the meantime, we can attempt to make it "suck less badly." Patch to achieve this laudable goal to follow. ;-)
Created attachment 115870 [details] [review] revision 1 This patch attempts to address the following issues on the main gmail page (i.e. the page with the list of messages). 1. When using Orca's caret navigation to move amongst items on the left-hand side, Orca says/does nothing. 2. Tabbing amongst links is hit or miss. 3. Arrowing within the ARIA list of "chat" contacts results in no speech. 4. Arrowing amongst items in the table which contains the list of messages results in no speech. 5. If a content creator has marked an entry as ARIA, you cannot arrow out of it; but given the very same entry on the very same page, but no associated ARIA mark up, you can arrow out of it. (If we can't distinguish these entries visually, and we aren't providing ways to distinguish them non-visually, shouldn't we be treating them the same for a consistent user experience?) Note this bug is strictly to address the above issues -- otherwise this will become an uber bug. :-) Therefore, please test this patch for its ability to improve gmail access without breaking anything else. :-) (Pylinted and regression tested -- and actually solves 2 "BUG?"s in the existing test and also one issue that isn't marked as a "BUG?" but probably should be).
This is much much much better!. There are still several tab stopps at the top of the page that aren't saying anything for me but that sounds like one of those new bugs. I can now tab to all the messages, the checkboxes and many other useful links. I haven't been trying this patch for a ton of time yet but am so far seeing no problems. I'd say go for it if you are feeling good about it. One thing to note that I just remembered as I was typing this is that I am currently running webvisum. If you want me to re-test without it I'll gladdly do so in the morning.
Thanks Mike. Webvisum is another one of those things that's "on my list" to check out. Since all I know about it is the very little I've read, I dunno if it can have any impact on Orca or not. If there's a chance that it can, then I'd appreciate your testing without it as well. This afternoon, believe it or not, I had gmail working better than it is with this patch. I was rather pleased with myself. But the regression tests put me back in my place with a number of braille regressions. :-( Anyhoo, after I do the get-the-context-at-once bug/refactor -- which is next on my list pending your testing of the word nav changes patch -- let's do some analysis of the gmail/ARIA situation.
Web visum doesn't seem to have an impact here.
Thanks Mike. Patch committed to trunk. Moving to pending.