Orca and Acrobat

Hi,

Sorry if this has been asked before. In the Orca 1.0 release

announcement I can read that Orca should 'just work' with
the 'fixed' 
version of Acrobat. Are there plans for making this enhanced
version the 
standard. If not we should look into providing the enhanced
version of 
Acrobat as the standard or as an option.


Henrik
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Hi Henrik,

> Sorry if this has been asked before. In the Orca 1.0
release 
> announcement I can read that Orca should 'just work'
with the 'fixed' 
> version of Acrobat. Are there plans for making this
enhanced version the 
> standard. If not we should look into providing the
enhanced version of 
> Acrobat as the standard or as an option.

Adobe did a bunch of work a couple of years ago to make
Adobe Reader for 
Linux and Solaris SPARC support the UNIX accessibility
framework.  They 
tested this work with the only screen reader we had back
then - 
Gnopernicus - and we had a fair amount working pretty well. 
Gnopernicus 
was able to track the caret to read PDF text, to track focus
to read PDF 
forms, and screen magnification tracked right along with the
caret and 
focus.

Unfortunately subsequent releases of Adobe Reader have since
broken this 
support.  The current versions of Adobe Reader fail to work
with Orca, 
as well as Gnopernicus.  Adobe is aware of these issues, and
we hope 
that they will fix the problems in their next release.

Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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On Fri, Dec 15, 2006 at 07:49:30AM EST, Henrik Nilsen Omma
wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Sorry if this has been asked before. In the Orca 1.0
release 
> announcement I can read that Orca should 'just work'
with the 'fixed' 
> version of Acrobat. Are there plans for making this
enhanced version the 
> standard. If not we should look into providing the
enhanced version of 
> Acrobat as the standard or as an option.

I personally think we should be pushing one of the free PDF
readers that 
uses GTK to add accessibility support. I would rather not
use Acrobat at 
all if there is another, more truely free option.
-- 
Luke Yelavich
GPG key: 0xD06320CE 
	 (http://www
.themuso.com/themuso-gpg-key.txt)
Email & MSN: themusothemuso.com
Jabber: themusojabber.org.au
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Hi Henrik:

> Sorry if this has been asked before. In the Orca 1.0
release 
> announcement I can read that Orca should 'just work'
with the 'fixed' 
> version of Acrobat. Are there plans for making this
enhanced version the 
> standard. If not we should look into providing the
enhanced version of 
> Acrobat as the standard or as an option.

Those "just work" words are mine.  The assumption
there was that if
Acrobat worked well with Gnopernicus, then the AT-SPI
implementation was
good and it should work well with other assistive
technologies.  

At one point, Acrobat worked with Gnopernicus - I even
saw/heard it, and
it was great to see Adobe take such a good step to support
accessibility. Support for accessibility broke somewhere
along the line,
however, and we notified the Adobe team about it a while
back.  My words
in the Orca v1.0 release were based upon the assumption that
we'd be
seeing something soon from Adobe.

Like anything, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.  Perhaps
members from
the community can help raise the awareness of the need for
accessible
support in Acrobat by logging constructive support requests
with Adobe?

As an alternative, the GNOME 'evince' project may have some
promise.  It
is lacking in accessible text support, but the rest of it
seems to do
well with Orca.  If an industrious sole (or group) were able
to look at
adding accessible text support to evince, it might become a
viable
solution for PDF access.

Hope this helps,

Will


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Hi Will, all.

> Like anything, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. 
Perhaps members from
> the community can help raise the awareness of the need
for accessible
> support in Acrobat by logging constructive support
requests with Adobe?

I'm certainly willing to squeak. <smile>  However, I
think it's
important to squeak in an informed fashion.  So I just
installed Acrobat
Reader 7.0.8.  The install itself was somewhat problematic
--
independent of accessibility.  That said, once I got the
kinks worked
out and enabled accessibility, I was able to read their help
file (a
PDF) using Orca.  

I did find another PDF on the Adobe site which I can
reliably use to
crash the reader when using Orca.  This, of course, is not a
good thing,
but I haven't tested long enough to determine if that is the
norm or the
exception.  

I suppose this is all a long way of saying: Do we know
exactly what was
broken so that we can ask specifically for it to be fixed?
Or was it
expected that I wouldn't be able to access PDFs at all using
Orca?

Thanks in advance!
Joanie

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Hi Joanie,
>  The install itself was somewhat problematic --
> independent of accessibility.  That said, once I got
the kinks worked
> out and enabled accessibility, I was able to read their
help file (a
> PDF) using Orca.  
> 
> I did find another PDF on the Adobe site which I can
reliably use to
> crash the reader when using Orca.  This, of course, is
not a good thing,

Hi Joanie, saddly the crashes are the norm which is what
makes the
reader unusable.  Several months ago I sent Adobe some
documents which
would cause crashes.  
good luck
Mike
Mike

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Hi Joanie:

> I'm certainly willing to squeak. <smile> 
However, I think it's
> important to squeak in an informed fashion.  So I just
installed Acrobat
> Reader 7.0.8.  The install itself was somewhat
problematic --
> independent of accessibility.  That said, once I got
the kinks worked
> out and enabled accessibility, I was able to read their
help file (a
> PDF) using Orca.  

That's a lot further than I've been able to get.  When I
arrow around a
document using caret navigation, I don't see any caret-moved
events
coming into Orca.  How were you able to read the document?

> I suppose this is all a long way of saying: Do we know
exactly what was
> broken so that we can ask specifically for it to be
fixed? Or was it
> expected that I wouldn't be able to access PDFs at all
using Orca?

I think we need to find the right way to log and track bugs.
 I'm not
sure if there's a convenient mechanism to do this, or if we
need to go
the backdoor e-mail route.  Let's both poke and see what we
can come up
with.  

Adobe has definitely helped us in the past (we wouldn't have
had an
accessible acroread for Linux at one time if they hadn't),
and I think
all we need to do is find the right person to help us out. 
Although we
have already let some folks in Adobe know of this problem,
it is a big
company and we might have been talking people who were
unempowered to
put resources on the problem.

In addition, maybe Andrew Kirkpatrick
(http://blogs.ad
obe.com/accessibility/) might be able to provide us with
some guidance and insight.  I've BCC'd him on this e-mail --
even though
I was able to use Google to discover his e-mail address, I'm
still shy
about posting people's e-mails to a public forum.

Will


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Hi Will.

> That's a lot further than I've been able to get.  When
I arrow around a
> document using caret navigation, I don't see any
caret-moved events
> coming into Orca.  How were you able to read the
document?

In the Preferences dialog, under Reading, did you check the
"Enable
Document Accessibility" checkbox?  With that enabled I
get the
caret-moved events I'd expect.  

(I'll refrain from making snarky comments about why the
"Enable Document
ACCESSIBILITY" checkbox was not placed in the
Accessibility
section). 

Take care.
Joanie

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I ceded control over access to my email address long ago!
I'm happy to
inquire into the best person/preocess to log bugs for this
(and I'll do
it if nothing else).

I'll check and let you know.
AWK




-----Original Message-----
From: William.WalkerSun.COM [mailto:William.WalkerSun.COM] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2006 1:10 PM
To: Joanmarie Diggs
Cc: orca
Subject: Re: Orca and Acrobat

Hi Joanie:

> I'm certainly willing to squeak. <smile> 
However, I think it's
> important to squeak in an informed fashion.  So I just
installed
Acrobat
> Reader 7.0.8.  The install itself was somewhat
problematic --
> independent of accessibility.  That said, once I got
the kinks worked
> out and enabled accessibility, I was able to read their
help file (a
> PDF) using Orca.  

That's a lot further than I've been able to get.  When I
arrow around a
document using caret navigation, I don't see any caret-moved
events
coming into Orca.  How were you able to read the document?

> I suppose this is all a long way of saying: Do we know
exactly what
was
> broken so that we can ask specifically for it to be
fixed? Or was it
> expected that I wouldn't be able to access PDFs at all
using Orca?

I think we need to find the right way to log and track bugs.
 I'm not
sure if there's a convenient mechanism to do this, or if we
need to go
the backdoor e-mail route.  Let's both poke and see what we
can come up
with.  

Adobe has definitely helped us in the past (we wouldn't have
had an
accessible acroread for Linux at one time if they hadn't),
and I think
all we need to do is find the right person to help us out. 
Although we
have already let some folks in Adobe know of this problem,
it is a big
company and we might have been talking people who were
unempowered to
put resources on the problem.

In addition, maybe Andrew Kirkpatrick
(http://blogs.ad
obe.com/accessibility/) might be able to provide us with
some guidance and insight.  I've BCC'd him on this e-mail --
even though
I was able to use Google to discover his e-mail address, I'm
still shy
about posting people's e-mails to a public forum.

Will


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Hi to all,
did you think about making evince accessible?
It seems to be the standard viewer for PS and PDF dockuments
under
gnome.
Advantage: It's free and you can view postscript files too.
Regards
Hermann


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