Well, after using this fix a few days, I got to say Orca 3.4 is an overall improvement over Orca 2.3 with my only complaint being its insistence on reading the time elapsed field on YouTube videos(at least with HTML5 playback). Trying to find a fix for that little annoyance, I discovered that in 7.2, the Orca preferences window is inaccessible and this fix doesn't work to make it accessible(and I double-checked with vanilla Knoppix 7.2 to confirm my alterations weren't the cause). I guess this bug was overlooked on account of being overshadowed by Firefox/Iceweasel being inaccessible and the Downgrade Fix fixing both problems. As for the above fix being unneeded when using Gnome instead of LXDE, I am going to assume crippling over-specialization: by making Orca better integrated into the Gnome Desktop, the orca devs negatively impacted compatibility with other DEs.