Orca and xfce

[James Freer]

On Tue, 18 Sep 2012, Jonathan Nadeau wrote:

> Hello list,
>
> i'm a blind user and I use the Orca screen reader. I've been working on 
> getting Orca to work with xfce. So far everything has been  going really 
> well. So far I've been able to make the xfce desktop accessible along with 
> the xfce menu and other programs such as pidgin. Here is a problem that I'm 
> having. When I open firefox and thunderbird Orca can't read anything in these 
> programs. Using the gnome desktop both of these programs  are very 
> accessible. So i'm not sure what I could be missing. I noticed that there is 
> a package firefox-gnome-support and this was already installed. I also 
> installed gedit and this application was accessible without having to do 
> anything to it. Any help would be greatly  appreciated. This would be a big 
> boost for the blind community to have a light and fast desktop to use as an 
> alternative to Gnome. Thanks for your time and help.

I'm not an IT guru but reading the info on orca makes me wonder about your 
settings. Orca has default settings and then also able to write scripts for 
application specific. That is where i think the problem is... i'm sorry i can't 
help further but i'm sympathetic as i used to work for the blind community and 
my sister was a Guide Dog Instructor for many years.

You mentioned Firefox and Thunderbird. I used to use both applications and had 
problems; Firefox always seem to run slow and Thunderbird slow for imap. 
Thunderbird has had a number of technical problems but i haven't used it now for 
two years - Alpine is old and well proven so it won me instantly. I switched to 
xubuntu using Chrome browser and Alpine for mail - all seem to use less 
resources and no problems.

james