The power of scripting...
In his blog today, Rich Burridge discussed his experiences with using Evolution and Orca's default script.
It's actually quite promising that Rich was able to do so much with the default script: when Mike Pedersen and I were working on the default script this summer, our goal was to provide decent "out of the box" accessibility to GTK apps without requiring the need for a custom script. With a complex application such as Evolution, however, I would expect there to be a need to extend the default script to provide compelling access for Evolution: there are a number of new user interaction models in Evolution that cannot be easily accounted for in the default script.
These unique interaction models are where scripts can really shine. For example, the user interaction model with gaim is a bit different from other applications: the text area you type in is the one that has focus, but all the "real" information appears in a text area that normally does not have focus (I'm not sure you can even give it focus). A typical screen reader experience is that you need to enter "flat review" mode to explore the window and discover the chat text to read any updates to it. This is a very cumbersome and unsatisfactory experience.
Mike and I sat in his San Francisco apartment one afternoon and hammered out a subscript for gaim in about 2 hours. This subscript merely extends the default script so that it automatically speaks updates to the unfocused chat window. Above that, all other interaction is handled by the default script. The solution was simple, the script was small, but the best result was this:
Mike says that the Orca/gaim combo is the best instant messaging experience he's ever had.
Admitedly, gaim is a rather simple application. We're busy working on scripts for more complex office productivity applications. Only time will tell if we've got something good on our hands, but I think we have something with great promise on our hands.
