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

[Janina Sajka <janina rednote net>]

Hi,

David E. Price writes:
> ... for speech output, I would suggest two things.  First, the current 
> > page numbershould always be available through "where am I" if that is 
> > the method for reading the status line. Second, I would suggest that, 
> > when the user is crossing a page boundary, the number of the page 
> > being entered is read before the content of that line.   For instance, 
> > if the sentence "orca is a screen reader that works well with many 
> > gnome applications." spanned the page break between pages 1 and 2, 
> > with the page break occurring between "works" and "well", the user 
> > reading downwards would hear: 
>
>
> > Orca is a screen reader that works 
>
> > page 2 well with many gnome applications. 

And what would Orca do when page 2 has a header block? For that matter,
what would it do when page 1 has a footer block?

Here's an example based on your sentence:

Orca is a screen reader that works
Orca Status Report                      June 1, 2008
By Staff Evaluator                            Page 2
page 2 well with many gnome applications.

I would really not care to hear even the page announcement in REadAll
mode--unless I have also enabled reading all punctuation and caps
indications in ReadAll--a kind of proofreading. And, if I've enabled
punctuation and caps for proofreading, wouldn't I also want to hear all
font changes? Bold? Italics? Etc?

PS: Did you notice that the header block I inserted was fully justified
content? The document title and document author being left justified,
and the date and page tokens being right justified. Wouldn't that also
need identification?

I suppose header/footer blocks should not be voiced automatically even
when reading line by line, sentence by sentence, or word by word. But,
do we want some indication that they are there, in place ready to print
to paper--which is their real utility? Do we want them read when
punctuation and caps reading is enabled?

I'm not against exposing all the myriad formatting data available in
documents. I welcome such things and would use them myself. I'm simply
suggesting we need to consider a more comprehensive set of use cases to
come up with the right strategy.

Janina