Orca & tbird issues

[Kyle]

Last time I tried Claws-mail, it didn't work with Orca. I think it was 
about a month ago that I last tried it, but then again, my result was 
the same as when I tried it probably 3 or 4 years ago, so my best guess 
is that either the devs are not aware that there is a problem, or they 
don't know how to fix it. The problem with gtk accessibility is that 
everything can look right, but things still tend to go wrong, and having 
personally dug into some gtk code that should have worked but was going 
wrong, it can be near impossible to file bug reports to try to make devs 
aware of these problems, and it can even be quite difficult at times to 
know who should get the bug report, at-spi, Orca, gtk/atk or the 
application itself. Many times I just put a bug report here and hope the 
right person eventually sees it. There also may be some newer 
documentation needed for how to make accessible gtk code work correctly 
with Orca/at-spi, as I have read some reports of that documentation 
needing an update, but many of us don't know things well enough at the 
code level to update it.

All this said, I wonder how beneficial it may be to have an automated 
test that devs could use to try to help determine how accessible their 
applications are and where they can improve. Perhaps it could catch 
things like custom widgets with no accessible role/label, an unspoken 
list such as a message list in a mail client or a control that can't be 
tab focused. Just a thought, but maybe it could work at least a little, 
if something like this doesn't already exist. I know that we have 
applications that can let someone know what is being spoken by Orca, but 
an automated test, although it has the potential to completely blow up 
over a false positive, maybe still could help. Just a thought.
Sent from Baltimore