Firefox 3 and Orca: Accessibility issues]

[Peter Laursen]

Hello everybody,

Previously, I wrote to this list stating that Firefox 3 was not accessible
with Orca, a screen reader allowing blind and visually impaired people to
navigate around Gnome and interact with various applications. Since then,
I have investigated the matter further and have found some interesting
things:

If Gnome 2.26.3 is built from packages, Firefox and Orca *do* work
together as they are supposed to, meaning that visually impaired people
can browse the web without booting into secondary operating systems. My
question, therefore, is the following: With what options is the Gnome
desktop built? Particularly, what Gecko engine is used in the built
packages? I am running the latest FreeBSD 8.0-BETA4 at the test machine I
used for the purpose of building Gnome.

* If one builds Gnome from ports (as I did yesterday), things do not go
that well. Orca and Firefox are then unable to communicate, leaving one
with the previous situation of not being able to browse the web.

This leads me to a second question: Is there any way of seeing what Gecko
engine (xulrunner etc) is being used? Can it be easily changed?

As for the make config-recursive-step, I just pressed "OK", leaving the
configurations in the default state.

I look forward to hearing from you and will of course be willing to do
some further testing.

Best regards,

Peter.
P.S.: Orca and Firefox 2 has never been able to communicate - one would
therefore only use Firefox 3.0 or 3.5