Making Application Specific Settings

To customize the settings for a particular application, you will first need to run that application. Make sure that that application has focus, then press ORCA_MODIFIER+Control+Space (by default, this will be Insert+Control+Space for the desktop keyboard layout).

This brings up a tabbed dialog window very similar to the generic Orca Preferences dialog, but with the following differences:

1. There is no initial General pane.
2. The Speech System and Speech Synthesizer combo boxes on the Speech pane will be grayed out (made inactive).
3. Any existing application specific key bindings will appear at the top of the list on the Key Bindings pane.
4. There may be a new application specific settings pane at the end of the set of tabbed panes. Note that pressing the End key from the tab list will get you directly to that rightmost tab.

Adjust your application specific Orca settings in a similar way to the way to set your general Orca preferences. For example, you may have key echo disabled generally in Orca but would like to specifically have it enabled for the gcalctool (GNOME Calculator) application. Here's where you could easily set that.

When you have your application settings customized the way that you want, press the OK button. These settings will be written away under your ~/.orca/app-settings directory in a file called <APPNAME>.py, where <APPNAME> is the name of the application.

These files are automatically written by Orca. The existing contents of that file will just be blown away each time you change your application settings for that application.

If you want to have some extra application specific settings or code that you don't want to lose, then you should put it in a file called ~/.orca/app-settings/<APPNAME>-customizations.py. This file will be automatically read when the settings for the <APPNAME> application are loaded.

Note that this is an advanced feature that we don't expect most Orca users to use. It's just there if you really want it.

IMPORTANT NOTE

There is currently one known bug (some people would call it a feature) that we are trying to track down and fix:

• If you adjust one or more application specific key bindings, the new values will not take immediate effect after you've pressed the OK button on the dialog. The workaround is to either restart Orca, or to Alt-Tab away to some other application and then Alt-Tab back to the one that you've just changed the key bindings for.