Re: [orca-list] suggestions for openoffice/orca improvements

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Steve:

> While talking about OO, I'm wondering how we can tell the status of the
> insert toggle?

OOo provides some info on the status bar, which you can get via a
double press of Insert+KP_Enter (desktop layout).

> This brings me to another question.  What is the best way to extend Orca in
> a way where a key is pressed and selected text or portion of the screen can
> be spoken?

This is a bit more difficult and we're curently working on better support 
for text selection at the moment.  But, if you wanted to experiment with
a very specific keystroke, I could give you some hints but don't have time
to write the code.

Starting with the section on adding your own keybindings to Orca under
http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions, you could make a 
keybinding for a method that looks at orca.orca_state.locusOfFocus.
You could then look at the text specialization via queryText().  On 
this object, you could look at the text.getNSelections() and then
ultimately get the selection of the text.  Look at the AT-SPI definitions
for text for more information:

http://svn.gnome.org/svn/at-spi/trunk/idl/Accessibility_Text.idl

>  Preferably, we could obtain the info to be spoken from the object
> modle.  Basically, this is scripting in a way but could really extend the
> functionality of Orca in a big way.  Unfortunately, I don't know python
> verry well at this point but I think with some good pointers and some
> documentation of Orca's object modle, we could probably build some of these
> functions as a community.  I also like to have a hot key tell me the current
> row and column in what text editors I use.  The info is on the status line
> but I would love to be able to hear it with a single key stroke.

If a double press of Insert+KP_Enter (desktop layout) to read the
status bar gives too little or too much information, you could try
hacking as
above. However, the status bar for each application tends to be done
differently, so it won't be so easy.  :-(

Will