GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 422487
Ability to jump to the start of the message in Evolution.
Last modified: 2008-09-15 15:08:06 UTC
From Darragh on the Orca mailing list: "Finally, I have a request: I would really love it if I could tell Orca to skip the message header information such as from, to, subject etc and start reading the message. I find it a bit annoying at the moment and although it could be my lack of experience with the graphical interface, I find that the results when pressing F6 to jump to the preview pane can be somewhat inconsistent. Example, Sometimes it's at the top of the message header but other times it's half way down." Reply from the Orca team: "The consensus was to have a special "hot key" in the Evolution script, that would take you to the start of the actual message (so we didn't have to keep tabbing and arrowing over the message headers." To be further evaluated...
Comment from Will to the Orca mailing list: As an addition or alternative to the hot key approach, what do people think of the idea of having Evolution just automatically positioning the caret at the top of the message content rather than at the top of the message headers? The Evolution developers might be amenable to this idea. Reply from Joanie: I think this makes the most sense if they are willing to do it.
Darragh replied: absolutely! This would definitly be preferable.
Henning replied: I would appreciate it. Javier replied: I agree too, but always having the possibility to go home and check the header information. The caret is on the text message, and at any time you can go home (control + home) and navigate in the header.
I've logged an RFE with the Evolution team to set the caret/focus to the beginning of the message content when you open a message: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=423346. We should not mark this particular bug as "[blocked]" yet, though, since we probably need to provide an Orca feature until the Evolution folks implement the enhancement request.
Oops: it's bug 423395.
Created attachment 85465 [details] [review] Patch to implement this enhancement. I haven't committed the patch; just attached it. As well as moving the focus (and caret) to the first line of the mail message body, it will also speak the first line of the mail message. I didn't braille that first line as the braille display has a nice summary of what the message header is. If you think I should braille the first line of the message and overwrite that, just let me know and I'll adjust the patch (it's only a one line change). Please give it a try. If you like it, I'll check it in. Thanks.
Spoke to Mike. He'd like the first message line to be brailled as well, so I've added the "braille.displayMessage(string)" line in to do that. Patch committed. I've put the bug into a "[pending]" state before I close it out.
Hey Rich, this works great. thanks much
Hmmmm. This is not working for me at all. :-( I wonder what I'm doing differently.
Are you taking the following steps? For a visual user, they are not obvious because we can see the current message embedded below the message header list. 1/ Start Orca 2/ Start Evolution in mail view. 3/ Set focus to a message in the message header list. 4/ Press Return That message gets displayed in its own separate window. Hopefully focus and text caret move to the first line in the message body in that window.
I am taking those steps actually. That's how I always access my email. (I disable the message preview so it's not embedded for me -- too much visual clutter/distraction)
Created attachment 85783 [details] first debug.out illustrating where it doesn't work I tried this a bit more. It seems that if the message is plain text, this fix works. If the message is HTML, it doesn't work -- at least not as expected: The message window appears and Orca reads/displays the first line of the signature (so it's starting out in the message) But then when I arrow once, I find myself in the message header rather than in the body (even though there is still more signature -- and in some cases more body text) left. In this sample, the signature line is at line 1588. I'll post another sample from a different message where the same thing occurs.
Created attachment 85784 [details] another sample debug.out The signature line here is in line 2695. As before, it is what Orca speaks/displays when the message window appears. Then down arrowing once moves me to the message header even though there is still more signature and body text after that initial line.
Created attachment 85916 [details] [review] Patch to try to handle HTML messages (not fully working). I've attached another patch. It still needs work. This tries to handle HTML messages as well (which have a different component hierarchy than plain text messages). I've moved the presenting of a mail message line out into it's own routine called presentMessageLine(). It's now used in three places. The following problems exist: 1/ Sometimes it's able to get to the first line of an HTML message and speak it, but it's unable to transfer focus there so that a down arrow would then go onto the next line of the message body. The focus is up in the From field, so a Down takes you to the To: header line. 2/ Sometimes when a mail message window comes up, and it tries to get all the ROLE_TEXT components below the object that currently has focus, it returns an empty list, so the code in section 12) of the locusOfFocusChanged routine is unable to do it's work. 3/ The code to try to grab focus: focusGrabbed = textObj.component.grabFocus() is just returning False. Maybe this is the crux of problem #1 although focus seems to be nicely set for plain text messages (even though the grabFocus() call still fails). Because of all these problems, I'm moving this bug out of the "[pending]" state. As the current code is producing inconsistent results, should I remove the original code to try to put the focus on the first line of the message body, and just wait until the Evolution people get around to fixing the problem in their code (bug #423395)?
I should also mention this comment from Andre w.r.t. the Evolution bug we submitted on this: -- Comment #1 from Andre Klapper (points: 26) 2007-03-29 17:01 UTC [reply] caret mode is extremely broken and there are several bug reports about it. it is not really usable with html email currently. -- It could well be that Evolution is screwing me over, in my attempts to correctly set the caret to the first line of the message body.
Rich, I agree that this is to inconsistent and should be backed out until we get some fixes from the evolution team.
Patch removed. Blocking against bug #423395
Removing target milestone from [blocked] bugs. We have little control over them, so we're better off letting priority and severity be our guide for poking the related components.
Bug #423395 has been marked as FIXED. Moving this to "[to confirm]" and "---".
With Evolution 2.23.90, when reading messages from the main window and caret navigation is enabled, tabbing from the message summary list to a message takes you to the beginning of the message content. When bringing up a message in a separate window, however, the caret is still positioned before the message headers. The Evolution developers are going to look into changing it so the caret is positioned at the beginning of the message content when you open a message in a new window. Moving this back to [blocked].
Blocking bug #423395 marked as FIXED. I tested it out and it works as expected. Closing this as FIXED.