Re: [orca-list] Your opinion regarding caret control in Gecko

[Peter Vágner <pvdeejay gmail com>]

Hello,
On 08.08.2014 at 14:53 Geoff Shang wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Aug 2014, Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
>
> > 1. Are you saying: Any time a widget gets focus, Orca would
> >   automatically turn all control over to Gecko? (Yes or no.)
>
> We may need to define "gets focus".
>
> When using NVDA, and probably JAWS as well, some controls like 
> checkboxes and radio buttons can be operated without leaving Browse 
> (NVDA) or Virtual PC Cursor (JAWS) mode at all. 
Yes it really works as described however this is because of additional 
browse mode features. This may be windows specific but when tallking 
MSAA or IA2, accessibility objects usually have so called default 
action.That is clicking the button, clicking the link, toggling the 
checkbox, selecting a radio button and maybe others. NVDA then bounds 
spacebar and enter keys to default actions. It means while you are in a 
browse mode you can to some extend operate these controls For example 
while browsing a page with NVDA you can activate links and buttons 
either by pressing the enter or the spacebar key because of this 
feature. I know it's usefull and if people will like it and 
knowledgeable person will be found which is willing to implement it it 
might also be added to orca however it does not break my proposal.
Combo boxes (as opposed to edit combos), which I think are option boxes 
in Orca (I've not used it for some time, show the currently selected 
item and only interact if they are opened (either by pressing enter or 
something like alt-down which opens as a list).
Yes thanks for the correction. This is something I've skipped in my 
explanations. When in so called browse mode pressing enter key on 
interactive controls such as entries and texts also switches to focus 
mode allowing direct interaction.
> In addition, edit fields which are reached by pressing e or Shift-E 
> are not focused immediately.  This is to allow the user to locate a 
> specific edit field by repeatedly pressing the e key.  I remember 
> there was some considerable discussion along the lines of what we're 
> having here now when this was implemented, but I've not seen any calls 
> to revisit the issue.
This respects the options I was trying to explain in my previous 
messages on this topic. If you choose not to switch to focus mode when 
moving the caret in browse mode you can press letter e multiple times to 
find out a particular edit field. However if you will choose to switch 
to focus mode when moving caret in browse mode and you press the letter 
e to go to an edit field, focus mode will activate for you after 
pressing letter e for the first time not allowing further keypresses.
> FWIW, and it may not be related, NVDA has a C++ virtual buffer library 
> which I believe is meant to be fairly portable and independent which 
> may be of help.  Their initial virtual buffer implementation was in 
> Python but it wasn't very efficient.

Yes this may be usefull however the only usefull pieces would be those 
indexing and rendering the content since communication between processes 
is done differently on linux than it's done on windows and this is the 
part where c++ implementation vs python implementation makes such a huge 
increase boost in performance.

Greetings

Peter