GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 537425
Orca should provide context for misspelled words in Thunderbird spell check
Last modified: 2008-06-17 20:58:12 UTC
The user needs to know the context of a misspelled word in order to correct the misspelling. Currently, the misspelled word could be located anywhere in the message, and so the user must guess or exit the spell check to determine the context. There are three possibilities for the context: (1) a window of n words to either side of the misspelled word (user configurable); (2) the line in the message containing the misspelled word; or (3) the sentence containing the misspelled word. I prefer the first option because it allows the user to determine the level of context needed, as well as avoiding problems of extremely short sentences or lines containing few words at the end of a paragraph. I suggest that the user be allowed to repeat the context by pressing a hot-key (such as orca modifier-c). Other information can be obtained using flat review, but the context needs to have a means for review as well. I suggest the following for presentation through speech. For verbosity set to verbose, Orca speaks "misspelled word", followed by the misspelled word, followed by the context, followed by "replace with:", and finally the suggested replacement word. For verbosity set to brief, I suggest that the context not be spoken, and the user can obtain it if needed using the hot-key. I am not a braille display user, so cannot suggest how context be presented through that output mode.
We discussed this bug in the Orca team meeting today. The plan is to add context for misspelled words in Thunderbird in the same way that we already have it for applications like gedit and oowriter. We likes the idea of a hot-key to repeat the context information, and I will be opening up a separate bug for that, as we will need to "back-port" that functionality to the other applications where we provide misspelling context.
The hot-key bug is bug #537676.
Created attachment 112548 [details] [review] Revision #1. Patch to provide misspelled word context for new composed messages in thunderbird. Not checked in yet. Please patch and test against SVN trunk.
I just tested with Orca trunk rev 3972 and the patch, and the context is being read well. The only problem I have with it is that the context provides no way to determine which of a pair of homophones is the selected misspelled word. For instance, suppose that I typed the sentence, "I know that kno one has heard from Rich." When I find that "kno" is the misspelled word, I have to guess if I forgot the 'w' or accidentally typed an extra 'k'. This is another place where I think a "system" voice could be very useful--when reading the context, the system voice would speak the misspelled word while the other voices would read as is usual. I've floated the "system" voice a few times on the mailing list without comment from the Orca team. Should I put in an RFE for it? Thanks for this fix!
I personally like this patch. As David does as well I'd say lets get it in. David, please feel free to file your other idea as an RFE.
Patch committed to SVN trunk. Moving to "[pending]".