Orca Tracking Issues, Other Qs About It

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä]

Hi,
Some Orca issues. I'm using the latest binary available via apt-get in 
Dapper. I've found that in some very basic apps tracking fails rather 
miserably. I wonder if these are known issues and or specific to my machine 
or if there's anything I can do. I've switched my theme to inverse high 
contrast 800x600, which is the clearest of the bunch for me, though far from 
what I'd like.

So here are the tracking issues:
in Gconf, when you navigate a list of values for a key, such as the list of 
visible columns for NAutilus, Orca fails to track the selection at all. The 
same thing, in my experience, with the Gnome panel if you move around the 
icon view containing all the panels you can add. Orca seems to speak nothing 
and the flat review keys, which should be changeable for laptops, by the 
way, just skip over the list of icons completely. That's odd.

The third app where I'm having similar issues is a file manager that was 
recommended to me namely Rox Filer. Tracking does work in the menus and 
dialogs but nothing is tracked when you select an icon in the main window. 
That prevents me ffrom using the app in the first place. I don't like 
Nautilus as it is barely as configurable as WIndows Explorer, which is not 
much, period.

If even garden variety Gnome apps have this bad issues, I wonder how usable 
the average gnome app would be. At the moment I'm rather sceptical about it. 
How do GTK1 apps like XMMS look to Orca? I'm a huge Winamp fan, as far as 
exotic formats go, so would really need access to this app as it is the 
closest Winamp equivalent you can get. Something which can use XMMS plugs 
would also do.

Lastly, I have noticed that my issue about gnome-panel crashing when trying 
to run orca in the run box is not specific to that app. When Gnopernicus 
starts the first time on logging in it works fine. IF I close it down and 
try rerrunning it in the run box, it crashes the gnoem panel similarly to 
how running Orca does. Too bad. Which makes me wonder two things. How do you 
change which app GNome uses as the screen reader? I'd like to have Orca 
start up when the screen reader box is checked. And also, step by step 
instructions on how to update or downgrade the gnome panel component, to 
resolve these issues, would be appreciated.

HOpe this can be of help.
If you need more version info and such, just ask and I'll dig it up if I 
know how.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila at mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/