Bugzilla – Bug 343917
Main-Menu overlaps Orca's screen magnifier
Last modified: 2008-04-30 03:32:14 UTC
Most other applications will reposition themselves outside of the area of the on-screen magnifier from Orca. Those that don't (which is also not good) remain in position underneath the magnifier. Main-Menu, however, appears on top of the magnifier, thus hiding magnifier. For informational purposes: My Main-Menu is on the panel at the top of the screen. My magnifier is set across the top of the screen with the following zoomer settings: - Top = 1 - Bottom = 201 - Left = 100 - Right - 1014 The workaround is to strategically place main-menu and magnifier in different areas of the screen to prevent overlap, but that's not a very easy solution, depending on the size of either component.
Hmm, I wonder if Orca will move itself if there's a window of type "dock" around it. The panel's clock (or intltlock, I don't remember which) would set its popup window type to DOCK to keep other windows away. We may want to try that with Orca.
Typically, though not all apps do this, when you launch Orca's magnifier (actually the program is gnome-mag), applications that would normally be in the area where the mag pops up get resized. Then again, even orca's own preferences window doesn't do this. Hehe. But apps like gnome-terminal, Evolution, and Firefox definitely resize themselves to get out of mag's way. The biggest problem is probably gnome-mag itself. Gnome-mag takes up space on the screen statically and "OWNS" the space. Gnome-mag itself should be changed so that the magnifier can hover over any part of the screen, much like http://magnifier.sourceforge.net does. In either case, neither gnome-mag nor the magnifier I just mentioned have enough developers to fix these problems. I personally much prefer the magnifier app, but while it has had much development in the Windows OS area, including dynamic mode support, they are short of developers to work on inclusion for the Linux OS area.
I would ask upstream what to do about this. "Apps resize to avoid the magnifier window" means that the magnifier changes the monitor struts, and the window manager moves apps to the correct place. However, main-menu is not a regular window, and is not managed by the window manager. It wouldn't be too hard to make main-menu actually pay attention to the monitor struts, *but* do you really want your main-menu appearing far away from the Computer button? Or would it be acceptable for the magnifier to move to another place while main-menu is up? In this case, we perhaps need a protocol to say, "magnifier, move away, please".
This one slipped my mind. However, Orca supposedly has made great strides since they upgraded to newer versions. Perhaps it has fixed itself. Will have to test when I get a chance.
Setting needinfo as per comment#4
This issue appears to be fixed in openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1. I'm going to go ahead and close this report. I just asked over in Gnome-A11y and was told it is likely unfeasibile to apply new Orca as a fix to older GNOME versions.