I was helping an open-source app become more #accessible yesterday and we ran into the problem that it looks like #screenReader Orca has a bit of a tendency to crash when exposed to webkitGTK applications.
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@pvagner @ghostrunner Unfortunately I don't have a setup to test it reliably. From what I heard, it's not so much Orca that crashes but rather tauri-based web apps themselves
@zersiax If you are working with someone else on this, can you please ask them to comment if it's an orca crashing or a different issue?
As I have said I have experienced when keyboard navigation has stuck in some unlabelled control and the only way to get the keyboard focus handling to work again is to restart the app either gnome web aka epiphany or any other tauri app such as deltachat-tauri. However during this orca is still running and switching into different windows it's responsive.
Severe orca issues like a crash are usually addressed in a timely manner so if we can find a reliable reproducer for an orca crash we can ask politely to get it fixed.
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@zersiax If you are working with someone else on this, can you please ask them to comment if it's an orca crashing or a different issue?
As I have said I have experienced when keyboard navigation has stuck in some unlabelled control and the only way to get the keyboard focus handling to work again is to restart the app either gnome web aka epiphany or any other tauri app such as deltachat-tauri. However during this orca is still running and switching into different windows it's responsive.
Severe orca issues like a crash are usually addressed in a timely manner so if we can find a reliable reproducer for an orca crash we can ask politely to get it fixed.
@pvagner They're telling me essentially the entire UI of the application disappears and only the application background remains visible when scertain parts of the app are interacted with. I passed on that link you gave me asking if they can comment on their experience
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@zersiax what exactly is wrong and where? You are declaring generalities where specifics are required to help correct.
I have 3 hours after work. I can fix one thing today. What one thing do you want fixed?
@ghostrunner @zersiax This is a deficiency in linux desktops as a whole. It would take months of work to fix. It's not just one problem, it's a whole series of problems split across different packages born out of neglect for accessibility
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The consensus seems to be that yes, this is broken, and no, there's not really any way around it for the moment. Also no, nobody's really fixing it.
i want to, #Linux enthusiasts, I really, really do. But it's exactly this kind of thing that make me entirely unable to consider any Linux flavor as an OS I could be productive in, heck ... that I could get light usage out of. When it comes to #accessibility stuff either breaks and stays broken for years or even longer, or never worked well to begin with. I know there's efforts on their way to fix that, and all the respect, gratitude and solidarity with the people doing that no doubt thankless, against-the-current work, but as of right now there's just not enough here for me to warrant the gigantic effort and investment to get anything usable out of it that actually stays usable longterm.@zersiax This is part of the reason that I main Gentoo. I don't want Linux on hard mode, but it's the only way I can make it work how I want it to work
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@ghostrunner @zersiax This is a deficiency in linux desktops as a whole. It would take months of work to fix. It's not just one problem, it's a whole series of problems split across different packages born out of neglect for accessibility
@PepperTheVixen @zersiax yeah, im seeing this.
if we built a service folks could submit their builds to which will test the matrix of setups, we could start building bulwarks against the neglect.
definitely not a 'ill fix this in 3 hours' and more a 'ill think about this nastiness for 3 hours and feel real bad'
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I was helping an open-source app become more #accessible yesterday and we ran into the problem that it looks like #screenReader Orca has a bit of a tendency to crash when exposed to webkitGTK applications. I've not done Desktop #linux for a long time and have no idea what the workarounds for this would be, does anyone know anyone who might know what's happening here? Do we need to set a random environment variable somewhere or update a specific package so this person can do basic screen reader testing on their app? #tech #openSource #screenReaders #linux #GTK #webdev
@zersiax the screenreader doesn't exactly crash when working with webkit-gtk or qtwebengine, but instead, browse mode doesn't work properly because the accessibility code doesn't have support for the object replacement character, which would tell orca where in a given piece of text it should insert a link
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@zersiax the screenreader doesn't exactly crash when working with webkit-gtk or qtwebengine, but instead, browse mode doesn't work properly because the accessibility code doesn't have support for the object replacement character, which would tell orca where in a given piece of text it should insert a link
@esoteric_programmer would that also cause the underlying application to crash/stop rendering? Thats one of the things we're seeing
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@esoteric_programmer would that also cause the underlying application to crash/stop rendering? Thats one of the things we're seeing
@zersiax nope, I've never seen that failure mode. Is this packaged as a flatpak with the gnome runtime or something like that, so I can possibly do debugging? what distro? what orca version? did you change anything from the orca config?
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@zersiax nope, I've never seen that failure mode. Is this packaged as a flatpak with the gnome runtime or something like that, so I can possibly do debugging? what distro? what orca version? did you change anything from the orca config?
@esoteric_programmer couldn't really say, wasn't the person experiencing it. I know it's a Tauri app, likely default orca settings, not sure about versions
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@esoteric_programmer couldn't really say, wasn't the person experiencing it. I know it's a Tauri app, likely default orca settings, not sure about versions
@zersiax yeah, tauri has issues on linux because of webkit-gtk, and that's not only accessibility related. Anyways, could the person build with electron for the time being, assuming they don't use a lot of tauri specific functions? also, is that a public app? if not, does orca log anything important while that happens?
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@ghostrunner @zersiax This is a deficiency in linux desktops as a whole. It would take months of work to fix. It's not just one problem, it's a whole series of problems split across different packages born out of neglect for accessibility
@PepperTheVixen @zersiax Even as someone who's sighted and (mostly) without disability, and technical, I was floundering on one distro just to get TTS besides espeak working. Thankfully far easier to solve elsedistro, but yeah, I keep seeing it being a problem and then people treating folks who are expressing broad frustration as "you're not being specific enough".
And I feel like half the problem is the people saying that are driven by problem solving only, and not learning about the entire puzzle to create their own problems within it to solve. Making disabled people do the lifting of clearly defining the technicals of their problems is, to me, a pretty crappy approach when the needs are well published already in numerous places and no one wants to learn them because they're not "technical problems".
Can't solve it yourself? Express empathy by doing what you can to put pressure on others to make it more accessible.
Speaking of, I still need to make that PKGBUILD for AUR so folks can install obs-localvocal to put captions on their stream (embed in video and/or standard subtitle closed captions in stream) more easily. Worked great once I built from source.
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@zersiax yeah, tauri has issues on linux because of webkit-gtk, and that's not only accessibility related. Anyways, could the person build with electron for the time being, assuming they don't use a lot of tauri specific functions? also, is that a public app? if not, does orca log anything important while that happens?
@esoteric_programmer I ... sincerely doubt they can, they're pretty invested. The app in question is OpenDeck. I really don't know much about logging etc., this wasn't a programmer tring to make Tauri work with Orca, this was a programmer seeing if they could quickly test a fix they'd made to their app, I don't think they stopped long enough to really figure out tauri internals when things fell over
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@esoteric_programmer I ... sincerely doubt they can, they're pretty invested. The app in question is OpenDeck. I really don't know much about logging etc., this wasn't a programmer tring to make Tauri work with Orca, this was a programmer seeing if they could quickly test a fix they'd made to their app, I don't think they stopped long enough to really figure out tauri internals when things fell over
@zersiax is it this?
https://github.com/nekename/OpenDeck/
and if I don't have the hardware, can I still test the stuff to see why it broke? -
@zersiax is it this?
https://github.com/nekename/OpenDeck/
and if I don't have the hardware, can I still test the stuff to see why it broke?@esoteric_programmer ...potentially. Interacting with the action list seemed to break it for them, but that was a newer version that adds fixes to make that part of it accessible, it isn't in stable yet. You could build it from main but you'd need cargo and deno. Worth just checking with stable to see if it falls over though, don't need the hardware for that
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@esoteric_programmer ...potentially. Interacting with the action list seemed to break it for them, but that was a newer version that adds fixes to make that part of it accessible, it isn't in stable yet. You could build it from main but you'd need cargo and deno. Worth just checking with stable to see if it falls over though, don't need the hardware for that
@zersiax alright! I have cargo because I write rust often, I don't have deno yet :p. But sure, will try stable
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@esoteric_programmer ...potentially. Interacting with the action list seemed to break it for them, but that was a newer version that adds fixes to make that part of it accessible, it isn't in stable yet. You could build it from main but you'd need cargo and deno. Worth just checking with stable to see if it falls over though, don't need the hardware for that
@zersiax alright, I downloaded the appimage. It works well if one knows what one is doing which I don't really, but an issue I see is that whenever I navigate with tab past the end of the ui, orca freezes and the thing along with it. I wasn't able to see exactly why this is, I bet it's something related to an integer overflow, but otherwise the app works normally, if only I knew what I was doing and how it's supposed to work. The settings page has a lot of unlabeled sliders, buttons and checkboxes, which could either be because of webkit-gtk, or those are actually not labeled. Browse mode is fucked but that's a well-known issue with webkit-gtk for now, and the fix might be simple, might be more complicated, I dk how webkit works well enough to say one way or another. But yeah, the appimage also did some unpleasant things to my system when I ran it, it installed files too big to be configuration related in XDG_CONFIG_DIR, what looks like the content of pluggins in ~/.local/share/opendeck and a launch icon in ~/.local/share/applications, without me asking it to do that, and all those files caused my disk space to depleat. So, for further testing, I'm gonna try to either run it as a flatpak if I can find it, or build from source.
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@zersiax alright, I downloaded the appimage. It works well if one knows what one is doing which I don't really, but an issue I see is that whenever I navigate with tab past the end of the ui, orca freezes and the thing along with it. I wasn't able to see exactly why this is, I bet it's something related to an integer overflow, but otherwise the app works normally, if only I knew what I was doing and how it's supposed to work. The settings page has a lot of unlabeled sliders, buttons and checkboxes, which could either be because of webkit-gtk, or those are actually not labeled. Browse mode is fucked but that's a well-known issue with webkit-gtk for now, and the fix might be simple, might be more complicated, I dk how webkit works well enough to say one way or another. But yeah, the appimage also did some unpleasant things to my system when I ran it, it installed files too big to be configuration related in XDG_CONFIG_DIR, what looks like the content of pluggins in ~/.local/share/opendeck and a launch icon in ~/.local/share/applications, without me asking it to do that, and all those files caused my disk space to depleat. So, for further testing, I'm gonna try to either run it as a flatpak if I can find it, or build from source.
@esoteric_programmer yep, I did hear that tabbing onto a thing caused it to crash, so that might be what you're seeing as well. ANd yes, still a lot of unlabeled controls, I'm working on it
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@esoteric_programmer yep, I did hear that tabbing onto a thing caused it to crash, so that might be what you're seeing as well. ANd yes, still a lot of unlabeled controls, I'm working on it
@zersiax yeah, it's tabbing past the end of the UI that crashes from what I'm observing here. Worthy of note is that this doesn't happen with other tauri apps I tried
