[orca-list] Contribution for Object Navigation

[Rynhardt Kruger <rynkruger gmail com>]

Hi everyone,

With relation to the recent discussion about reading mathematics, I've
wondered if object navigation functionality can be used to read
mathematical equations in more detail. I'm specifically referring to
the functionality provided by NVDA and Voiceover, whereby one can
navigate through the object hierarchy of the UI. Note that as far as I
know NVDA doesn't actually use object navigation for equation reading,
but rather gets MathPlayer to handle it.
To test whether object navigation could be useful for equations, I
made a small implementation for Orca over the long weekend, and it
seems to work reasonably well. My implementation can also be used for
navigation in general. I also try to simplify the object hierarchy
somewhat, by removing panels and other elements without interesting
text, though this might require some tuning still. Also, in the case
of maths in particular, I'm not sure how to include things like the
start and end of fractions, super and subscript indicators, and other
non-symbolic indicators in the hierarchy. These things get read out
when encountered as part of an expression or sub-expression, but not
at the leaves of the object tree. (I should note that I use Orca's
excellent generator functionality to produce the actual announcements
for each object.)

So my question is, would something like this be useful enough to be
included in Orca itself? If so, I can make a merge request on Gitlab.
If not, it might be useful as an extension for Orca, but I'm not
exactly sure how it could be packaged.
I could also just upload it to a github repo for further input.

Thanks and regards,

Rynhardt