FlorianI 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
the esoteric programmer@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
@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
@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 :)
@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?
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
@zersiax alright! I have cargo because I write rust often, I don't have deno yet :p. But sure, will try stable
@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 ;)
@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
@esoteric_programmer I heard that apparently Dorion, another Tauri app, does this as well . never heard of it but that could be another test
@zersiax hmm, will look into that, never heard of it