Re: Can the community work with Gnome to improve GTK+ a11y?

[Christopher Chaltain <chaltain gmail com>]

On 05/01/12 16:17, Bill Cox wrote:
> On 1/5/12, Brian Nitz <brian nitz oracle com> wrote:
>> In the case of Orca speech could there be an optional:
>>
>>     - Auditory cue (low volume double speed narration?) when keyboard
>> navigation bypasses disabled widgets.
>>
>>     - Shifted mode which allows the user to traverse through and view
>> the disabled widgets
> 
> A third possibility might be to read the focused menu item normally,
> followed by the words "skipped unavailable menus " and the names of
> the menu items that were skipped.  In the most common case, the user
> is already aware that he may have skipped items, so with this solution
> the user gets the information he needs as fast as he does today.
> However, if the announced menu is not what was expected, he can wait
> and hear if the one he wants was skipped.
> 
> I find it annoying in Windows to arrow down through unavailable menus
> with NVDA.  It announces the name of the menu item, without mentioning
> it's unavailable until the end.  Impatient users like me often press
> enter while the menu item is being read, and in Windows you just
> wonder why nothing happened.
> 
> I think there's an opportunity to improve over what's been done before.

I would agree. I think in JAWS I was able to configure whether I heard
available or unavailable and whether I heard it before the option or
after the option. I think it was in Lotus Notes when I tried to
configure it to say just unavailable for the grayed out options and to
say it before the option was spoken, just what Bill described here, but
I don't think I ever got it to work quite the way I wanted it to. You
obviously wouldn't want to hear available for all the available options,
and you especially wouldn't want to hear it before the option itself was
read.

Note that this also applies to spread sheets and tables. Sometimes I
want to hear the header read before the cell content and sometimes I
want to hear the cell contents first. It would be great if this could be
easily configurable, although maybe it already it ans I just haven't
spent enough time in Libre Office yet to know how Orca behaves.

-- 
Christopher (CJ)
chaltain gmail com