The chief complaint of Orca users, both new and old, is that Orca is sluggish. While this complaint is most frequently made in reference to access to Gecko-based applications, there is evidence of performance problems throughout Orca. Identifying, and eliminating, these problems is an essential “first step” in bringing GNOME’s screen reader more on par with the non-free alternatives.

The Orca Team and the GNOME Accessibility Team are grateful to Mozilla for providing the support needed to complete this work.

Description of the work

• Conduct a full evaluation of Orca’s performance problems.
• For all performance problems discovered:
  • Fix those which exist within Orca’s code.
  • File bugs for those which exist in other modules so that those maintainers can fix them.
• Implement solutions to ensure new performance problems are not inadvertently introduced:
  • Add a performance profiling system to Orca.
  • Augment Orca’s regression test suite with performance tests.
  • Document the problems found and strategies used to improve performance.