Re: [orca-list] Firefox3 and sayAll broken with latest trunk update

["Rich Caloggero" <rjc MIT EDU>]

> ... so hotkeys can be used to mimic the way that sighted
> users read what is being displayed, skipping, scanning headers,
> and reading things of interest.  Am I making sense?

Isn't this what orca does now? Its still a bit buggy, but for the most part 
you can do what you want.  There aren't as many hot keys as there are in 
jaws, but moving by heading (the most important in my opinion) work fine, 
especially when the collection interface is used.

insert+left/right arrows will move you object by object. You can also move 
line by line with the up/down arrows.  Left/right arrows move by character. 
When you cross paragraph boundaries when moving with left/right arrows (i.e. 
by character), it just moves to the next object (a paragraph) and puts you 
on the first character of that paragraph.

The virtual buffer approach has issues with staying in sync with the real 
page, especially when ajax is used.  Operating in live mode as we do now, 
the issues are how to move out of objects that use the arrow keys for their 
own purposes. The best example of that is the textarea element (multiline 
textbox).  So, to get out of that you can either tab or shift+tab, or use 
the insert+arrow keys as previously mentioned. I'd say the live approach is 
cleaner and seems to have fewer gotchas.

Just my 3 cents.
-- Rich


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Hermann" <meinelisten onlinehome de>
To: <orca-list gnome org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008 10:08 AM
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Firefox3 and sayAll broken with latest trunk update


am Di 04. Mär 2008 um 15:40:32 schrieb Gaijin <gaijin clearwire net>:
> On Mon, Mar 03, 2008 at 02:48:36PM -0500, Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
> > If I were asked "What is the most important thing that you've learned
> > the past year?" my answer would be that web page content can be marked
> > up in so many different ways and gets exposed to us by FF in so many
> > different ways that "getting everything right" means finding examples of
> > all of the possibilities and addressing them.
> :End-Quote:
>
> Is there some way that Orca can be made to use a kind of virtual
> cursor to read the page, navigating the page as it cursors through it?
> Might be a nice feature if it could be halted as something is being
> read, and findingyour real cursor in the general vacinity of where you
> stopped reading.  Would be even nicer if you could start/continue
> reading from the cursor as well.  Use a hotkey to go to a spot (like a
> header) and then start reading from there, bypassing all the stuff you
> can easily bypass if you're sighted.  I think the whole idea is to mimic
> the way people actually read/scan documents through the use of hotkeys
> to skip things of no interest, and read what does interest you.  I guess
> Orca would have to know how the web page is coded then, but I can't see
> any other way to accomplish anything without it, unless there is some
> kind of virtual cursor that Orca could follow that Firefox couldreport
> on.  Firefox would have to support the ability to navigate the entire
> document, character by character, from start to finish, supplying extra
> info like "this is a header" and "this is an edit field." ...

We had this issue about one year ago, and there were heated discussions
that ended up with the decission not to use virtualisation at all.
[...]
> Anyway, if there was an ability to cursor through each displayed
> character in Firefox, reporting field changes under the table to
> the screen reader, then screen readers should, theoretically, be
> able to more easily compose things forquicker and easier
> navigation, so hotkeys can be used to mimic the way that sighted
> users read what is being displayed, skipping, scanning headers,
> and reading things of interest.  Am I making sense?

In my view you make a lot of sense. Last year I belonged to the minority
that suggested virtualisation, but it was rejected by the majority.
However: Changing this in this state of development means to design a
new screen reader. So I think we should take action to improve Orca's
behavior within the chosen approach.
The alternative is to start developing a competetive product (I hope
that I don't get stoned for writing this).
Hermann
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