Travis, this is excellent! It actually relates to the discussion about firefox we are having on the mac visionaries list. I say this because if you look at the messages in the apple forum about attempting to get vo to work in safari, you see a similar pattern. It gets busy, ooses focus etc.
On Dec 31, 2008, at 8:04 AM, Travis Siegel wrote:I realize folks here (and elsewhere) are blaming this reloading thing on webkit, but I am not convinced this is the problem.
Why?Because, as has been pointed out several times, copy/paste of the offending page into text edit or some other editing package still renders the page properly. If this were a web kit problem, the page should misbehave regardless of what program it's droppped into, since they all use the same apis to do their rendering. I'm convinced it's something to do with the way vo is getting the information from the page.
Again, why? Because, this doesn't only happen under web page reloads.I've also had vo loose focus so badly in other programs, including text edit, finder, disk utility, mail, and others that the only solution is to turn off voiceover, then turn it back on to get the offending app to allow vo to read the contents of the screen properly.
I'm sure every one here has seen this behavior.You try to move around the screen, and all you get is bing noises, because vo says there's nothing there. This is exactly the same behavior, only on a slightly different scale as the web page not being seen by vo.
Why does this happen?I have no idea, but for the most part (at least with non-safari related issues) it seems to happen after the system claims to be busy for a bit, then whichever app was front-most when the system recovers from it's busy state suddenly and inexplicably has these issues. I submit that the safari issue is a variation on a theme, (though I've experienced the bing problem from safari too I might add). Blaming it on webkit might rovide a focus for the complaints, but I doubt it's the proper culprit in this case, since visually, the pages are rendering fine, and (as mentioned above) cut/paste of the content into another window allows the page to be navigated mostly normally. I realize it's an intermitent thing, and as a result, it makes it darned near impossible to track down, even for someone running debug versions of the kernel and fully profiled code, but I think we should be addressing these issues to apple as vo ones, not webkit ones. Even if it is a webkit issue (which I doubt) we should still address them to apple as vo issues, because for us, it's only a problem when using vo, it's not an issue for sighted folks using safari, shiira, camino, or any other browser which uses webkit. And, because it's visually possible to move around and click on things in these browsers, sighted folks aren't going to see this as an issue no matter how much you complain about it. Ergo, the vo team is the only one equipped to handle them, and that's where the reports should go. Of course, you should be as complete as possible, stating under which conditions the problem occurred, where you were, what you were doing, and so forth, being as polite as possible of course, so at least we can get it looked at. If enough folks report enough of these pages that misbehave, Apple may eventually find a pattern, and be able to nail it down to an offending semicolon or something equally simplistic. *grin*
Just my input on the matter, take it as you will.
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