Would You try to help visually impaired users of at-spi compatible assistive technologyes to use XFCE desktop environment?

[Nick Schermer]

2009/12/25 Mgr. Janusz Chmiel <chmiel at deep.cz>:
> Dear core developers of XFCE,
>
>     I Am a visually impaired user and i tested Mandriva One     2010.0 live
> Cd with XFCE desktop environment. I found out, that this desktop environment
> is using very little RAM, is very modular and i would like to valuably
> please You, if You would try to find The solution for The following problem.
>
>     I Am able oto use Orca with XFCE, but only when I Am running Mozilla
> Firefox. In this case, all dialog box, including all tabs, all menu items
> are accessible by using Orca with Mozilla firefox. I can even browse The WEB
> page content and I Am able to use all quick navigation keys of Orca screen
> reader to quickly access all WEB page elements.
>
> But i can not use The Orca preferences dialog box, i AM not getting feetback
> from Orca, but Orca is not crashing, when i press ESC key, i can work with
> Mozilla Firefox again. Please, would You try to help visually impaired users
> to use Orca? I think, that it would not to be difficult, because i did not
> occurred random crashes while sufring The WEB with Mozilla Firefox, no
> crashes related to called procedures or functions from The libraries, which
> Orca and it's compoents is using.

By default Xfce does not set the required environment variable to make
gtk use the accessibility backend (atk -> gail), i've created a bug
[1] for that, because that is indeed quite important.

To enable this in the toolkit you can do 2 things:
1) Create a .gtkrc-2.0 file in your home-directory and add the line:
gtk-modules="gail:atk-bridge"
2) Export a environment variable GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge

The first one if most likely the best option for you. Once you added
this and restarted X, all applications will send their information to
Orca (tooltips, label, terminal lines, etc). It also looks like that
when 1 or more applications are connected, Orca keeps running.

If you have more questions, problems or Xfce application that are
unaccessible, feel free to report them (if possible new bugs in our
bugzilla, see link below, or this mailing list).

Nick

[1] http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6104