Re: [g-a-devel] How to know where the text caret is

[Peter Korn <Peter Korn Sun COM>]

Hi Kristian,

You can do this directly by listening for caret events (I'll leave it to 
others to point you to specific lines of code in Gnopernicus, Orca, or 
LSR that do this).  But may I suggest a different approach? 

Screen readers like Orca do a lot more than just track the caret.  They 
track focus, they track selected items in menus and cells in tables.  
With features like flat review, they will even walk through the screen 
(without generating any events) to read what is there a letter/word/line 
at a time.

May I suggest you either: (a) implement the gnome-mag API such that a 
screen reader can drive the magnifier directly; or (b) explore a new, 
non-CORBA API for communication between the Zoom plugin and assistive 
technologies in order to have an AT drive the Zoom plugin?


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

> I'm working on improving the Zoom plugin in Comiz; giving it a few
> accessibility improvements. I want to make it able to track the
> text-caret, similar to what orca and gnome-mag does.
>
> I wish to use AT-SPI for this, and I've been experimenting with it to
> figure out how. I was hoping someone could point me in the right
> direction so I could fetch the caret position (when changed) and
> figure out where it moved in screen coordinates.
>
> So far, I've modified an existing (small) at-spi application and I've
> been able to fetch object:text-caret-moved events, which seems to give
> me the character/caret offset. If anyone could give me pointer on how
> to convert this to screen coordinates (my efforts didn't prevail), it
> would be much appreciated.
>
>