Re: [orca-list] Copy, Cut and Paste feedback Orca feature request

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

Hello,
here are some of my thoughts regarding this. I have got very used to 
orca not announcing this information, so I don't feel a great need for 
me to have it. However I can see that for some it could be useful. I 
would say though we do need to make sure it is done correctly. I can 
think of an example of a screen reader on another OS which seemed to 
speak cut, copy and paste regardless of what the action really was, I 
believe it did this because it was set to speak cut on control x, copy 
on control c and paste on control v, unless the settings file for the 
specific application said otherwise. This example is as bad, possibly 
even worse than our current situation with orca as its speech output 
could actually be wrong rather than non-existent.

Now Will's suggestion of a way of monitoring the clipboard directly (or 
checking the clipboard) would be the best way as this doesn't depend at 
all on the key presses. I haven't got a clue whether this would be 
possible or not (either directly with at-spi (although Will doesn't 
think there is a way) or through another application).

Isaac, do you have any clue as to how the screen reader you are thinking 
of does this? Does it respond to the key press and then check whether 
cut, copy or paste may have occurred or does it do it by monitoring the 
clipboard? I know that the accessibility APIs on different OSs do differ 
in the way they work, but it would indicate whether a satisfactory 
solution could be done by monitoring the most commonly used cut, copy 
and paste keys (IE. ctrl+x, ctrl+c and ctrl+v). As an example of my 
thinking here, we could make a pretty good guess that something has been 
copied if the user presses ctrl+c and there is something selected.

Michael Whapples
On -10/01/37 20:59, Isaac Porat wrote:
> Hello All
>
> The Cut, Paste and Copy feedback is a feature which I appriciate with my
> screen reader in the other OS and wonder if other people share the same
> view, I would like to suggest a similar feature in Orca.
> Please find below my communication with Will which will clarify the issue.
>
> I am looking forward to your feedback.
> Regards
> Isaac
>
> And the communication with Will...
> Hi Isaac:
>
>    
> > I send this to the list but received no feedback; perhaps lost among
> > the discussion on text processing...
> > So I send this to you privately.
> >      
> Using the list would be preferred.  I get lots of e-mail and rely upon
> others on the orca-list to help me out with answers.  I also prefer to have
> public discussions around these kinds of things.  :-)
>
>    
> > A feature that I find very useful with my screen reader on that other
> > operating system is feedback on Copy, Cut and Paste.
> > So If I try to copy something that was highlighted I press Ctrl + c
> > and it will say 'copied'
> > If nothing is highlighted it will say 'nothing to copy' it works in a
> > similar way with Cut.
> > With paste it will say 'pasted' and if there is nothing to paste from
> > the clipboard it tells you 'nothing to paste'.
> > I find the above very useful indeed but as far as I can tell Orca does
> > not do this.
> > Can I request this as a feature?
> >      
> Right now, I'm not sure there's anything in the AT-SPI that allows us to
> know for sure that something was added to the system clipboard or pulled
> from the clipboard.  There might be some other API's that can help us, but
> I'm not sure.  I see something here, but I don't see a way to be notified
> when something is posted to or copied from the clipboard:
>
> http://www.pygtk.org/docs/pygtk/class-gtkclipboard.html
>
> There might be some sort of D-Bus protocol for working with the clipboard,
> but I'm not aware of it.  In addition, there seems to be a GUI applet
> (http://sourceforge.net/projects/glipper/) for monitoring the clipboard.
> This might be something that could be scripted.
>
> In any case, if you open an enhancement request at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
> against the Orca project, we can track it.
>
> Will
>
>
>
>