Re: [orca-list] Calling all braille users. I need your opinions.

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

Joanmarie Diggs <joanmarie diggs gmail com> wrote:
> As some of you know, I've never been jazzed by Orca's presentation of
> content in braille because in many instances braille seems to have taken
> a backseat to speech output. And that excludes users who are Deaf-Blind.

It also doesn't help those who prefer braille, or whose ears are otherwise
occupied, for example by a conversation, meeting, phone call, etc.
 
> Action item 1: I will add the ability to specify the duration to the
> Preferences dialog.
>
> Question 1a: I think seconds is preferable to milliseconds as far as a
> dialog box is concerned. What about y'all? 

I agree.
> Question 1b: If the consensus is to prefer seconds in the Preferences
> dialog, how much granularity do you want? (i.e. ones, tenths,
> hundredths)

It's hard to know without experimentation - perhaps 0.25 seconds, just as a
starting point?

It should be possible to specify more precise values by editing
~/.orca/user-settings.py, which should satisfy those who think the granularity
is inadequate.
 
> Question 2a: What about keys which change a speech-only setting on the
> fly, e.g. to toggle the speaking of indentation and justification?
> Should we flash it in the spirit of fully equally speech and braille, or
> not display it in braille because if you toggled the speaking of
> indentation and justification, you are probably also using speech and
> were able to hear the message?

The only case for the first option that comes to mind is one in which a
braille user is adjusting these settings for a speech user. To accommodate
this, perhaps the messages should be displayed in braille if speech is not
currently active. That way, a braille user could turn off speech temporarily
but still receive confirmation of the setting changes.
> Note that I think toggling speech enabled/disabled should always be
> flashed because it wouldn't be redundant if something had gone wrong
> with your synthesizer.

Agreed.
> * Progressy updates. There are two such categories: Spoken messages to
> let you know an app is busy ("loading please wait", "finished loading")
> and actual progress bars. Personally, I'd flash the former
> automatically; I'd flash the latter at the same time we were speaking
> the percentage.

Right, as long as the percentages aren't updated too often so as to avoid
unnecessary writing to the braille display.
> * Text formatting (i.e. when you press Orca+F). Orca does allow you to
> underline desired attributes in braille. But if you want to know if
> something is bold versus underlined, you currently have to ask Orca with
> Orca+F -- and currently you have to be able to hear because we only
> speak that info. There are, in my mind, two issues here: We should have
> an efficient way of marking up text and optionally showing the
> formatting in braille without your having to read through everything
> Orca+F outputs. But given that at the moment, that's not in place, I'm
> very strongly leaning towards Orca+F displaying the same thing it
> speaks.

That would seem to work for the moment, although I agree it is desirable to
present this information efficiently in braille. With so many character sets,
translation tables etc., it isn't clear how to do this properly, however.

As an aside, the "caret follows braille window" behaviour is very useful and a
substantial improvement.