Re: [orca-list] Table headers and coordinates in braille

[Mario Lang <mlang delysid org>]

Hermann <meinelisten onlinehome de> writes:

> am Do 10. Apr 2008 um 09:31:44 schrieb Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>:
> > A question to other users: how, ideally, should tables be presented in
> > braille?
> >
> > I can think of various possibilities, but let's hear from others first.
>
> One possibility is to create a "structured mode", known from Jaws. In this 
> case all the information of the actual cell is presented in one row on the 
> display. It should be possible to temporarily switch to that mode, or 
> activate it permanently in applications where it seems useful.
> Note: I don't know whether such a feature would be supported by brltty's 
> brlapi, since Windows screen readers come with their own braille drivers 
> and 
> don't have to rely on external programs or interfaces.

You mention this as if it were a negative.  Actually, BrlAPI
is a very postive feature, and we've worked hard internally to get something
as BrlAPI into place.  The fact that you can switch away from the graphical
desktop to the text console, effectively switching between
two different types of screen readers without you having
to reinitialize your braille display is an absolute blessing!

And to answer your question, no, BrlAPI or brltty do
not pose any limitations on how Orca can represent
tables in braille.  One might argue that the only remaining limitation
in regard to BrlAPI is that there is currently no way
to access the status cells of some display types, which might
come in handy here.  But the "some" in the sentence above is the catch here:
some displays do not have status cells at all, so they would have to be
emulated anyway, which would be done inside orca.

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