GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 464734
Provide some kind of visual feedback for the item with focus
Last modified: 2013-01-02 11:04:14 UTC
We asked the low vision folks on the Orca mailing list the following question. As you know, Orca has a "say all" function whereby it will speak/braille the whole of a text document. As we progress through the document, what we would like to do for low vision users, is to provide some kind of visual feedback to show exactly where in the document you currently are. Now what form should that feedback take? We can easily set the text caret to the currently spoken word. Alternatively should we try to highlight the current word, or underline it, or put a rectangle around it, or ... ? Your input would be very much appreciated. -- I will add the feedback we received as comments to this bug, and then we'll work out the best way to implement this feature.
From Ian Pascoe: This is to provide a visual clue to the word that's currently being spoken right? I'm afraid that my answer is "yes"! In the MS environment using Zx I use both rectangles around the word being spoken generally, but in some instances, most noteably on busy documents I use the colour inversion to highlight the entire block surrounding the word, to make it stand out more. Again utilising my Zx experience, I'd suggest that for the rectangle the ability to alter the thickness of the surrounding line would be of benefit. For the word block inversion, minimally the options of inverting the colours so the text takes on the background colour and the background the word colour, and a straight contrast inversion of the current colour scheme.
From Rudolf Weeber: That would be a great feature. It would be very interesting not only for "say all" but also when moving through a web page in Firefox with caret navigation. Often I can see the general stucture of a web page, but I have no clue, what of it I'm reading at the moment. As my remaining sight is not too good, I'd probably use color inversion. It would be great, if the block would change size depending on the environment. * a smapp paragraph of text in a document with a lot of structure * in a long document with little structure perhaps a line of text
In light of Rudolf's observations -- and an idea I have :-) -- I'm retitling this bug. It would also be nice to optionally do things to make the control with focus stand out more. While I'm not positive about this, I think we can pull off these sorts of things by creating additional zoomers. Right now we only have one zoomer that occupies the full magnifier. If we could superimpose a second zoomer over the object of interest we could do things like: * draw a block around it by the application of a border * invert its color * lower the brightness and/or contrast of everything else * magnify just the item of interest (or magnify it a bit more) * etc.
See also http://bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=102532&action=view from bug 363793 for something that's trying to draw stuff if the COMPOSITE extension is enabled.
First coarse pass at GNOME 2.24 planning.
Putting this on the 2.28 list with the intention that some new magnification or highlighting API will be written as part of the deprecation of Bonobo/CORBA.
Created attachment 133734 [details] [review] Toy patch This is a toy patch that's only loosely tested and is not really quite the right thing to do. What it does, however, is use the "outlineAccessible" method of the script to draw an outline around the locus of focus whenever it changes. The idea here is that the outlineAccessible can be anything we want it to be -- right now, it just draws an outline. However, it could other things such as inverting colors, zooming, etc. In playing with this, it's obvious that the component extents for some objects (e.g., items indented in a table) are just plain whacked. In addition, treatment for things such as text areas (i.e., highlighting the caret position) is also needed.
As an alternative, Joanie thinks this might be something accomplishable via theming. For example, the Aero-ion theme provides some highlighting and such: http://art.gnome.org/download/themes/gtk2/1361/GTK2-AeroIon.tar.gz This could potentially be customized a *lot* more. See also http://live.gnome.org/GnomeArt/Tutorials/GtkThemes
We are late in the 2.28 release cycle and I want to focus on "high impact"/"low risk" items that also fall within the release team's restrictions in place. Regretfully, this bug doesn't fit well within those constraints and we'll review it for the 2.29 release cycle.
This made a lot more sense when Orca was also driving the screen magnifier and we didn't have gnome-shell. Now that we aren't doing magnification and we do have gnome-shell, this functionality would make more sense as a gnome-shell extension rather than a feature of a screen reader.