Some issue in ScitE for Linux with Orca screen reader

[Luigi Russo]

Hello,

I'm blind user and interact with pc via screen reader.

In last days I using Linux, in particular Arch.

I tried to install ScitE for programming. The program is usable, but
when I delete a character or move cursor and find a space Orca not read it.

It's possible solve this problem?


Thanks a lot for attention


Gigi

[Neil Hodgson]

giginap...:

 

I tried to install ScitE for programming. The program is usable, but

First, ensure accessibility is turned on although it should be by default. This is controlled by the accessibility property which is 1 to enable and 0 to disable. Some parts of SciTE support screen reading even when accessibility=0.

 

when I delete a character or move cursor and find a space Orca not read it.

So, there is some screen reading occurring but not for some actions?

If a line is:

# sudo make install

and the caret starts on the left before the '#' and I press the  right arrow key, I hear "space". This is Ubuntu 23.10 with "Screen Reader" on.

If I move to before the first 's' I hear "ess", then press Del, and hear "delete". It doesn't say "delete ess" which may be more reasonable.

Scintilla, the text editing component inside SciTE, implements the GTK accessibility API but that doesn't mean it directs the screen reader to say particular things. What it does is tell the accessibility API that it is dealing with text and provides ways for the accessibility tools to navigate and manipulate the text and discover aspects of it like colour. This code is in scintilla/gtk/ScintillaGTKAccessible.cxx.

It's possible solve this problem?

It may be possible to provide more information to the accessibility APIs or provide it in a different way but the effects are indirect and unpredictable.

Neil

[Luigi Russo]

Il 02/04/24 13:27, Neil Hodgson ha scritto:
> [...]

> First, ensure accessibility is turned on although it should be by
> default. This is controlled by the accessibility property which is 1
> to enable and 0 to disable. Some parts of SciTE support screen reading
> even when accessibility=0.

Gigi:

ok, I set the property to 1, but is the same result. Therefore I wrong
about space, infact it works correctly.


Neil:

> So, there is some screen reading occurring but not for some actions?
>
> If a line is:
>
> # sudo make install
>
> and the caret starts on the left before the '#' and I press the  right
> arrow key, I hear "space". This is Ubuntu 23.10 with "Screen Reader" on.
>
> If I move to before the first 's' I hear "ess", then press Del, and
> hear "delete". It doesn't say "delete ess" which may be more reasonable.
>

Gigi:

Orca by default has enabled keyboard echo. I suggest to disable it and
enable only echo on character and word.

Ins+Space, go to echo tab, deactivate checkbox enable echo on keys,
activate checkbox Enable echo on character and enable key echo on word.
Click to Ok for confirm.


Neil:

> Scintilla, the text editing component inside SciTE, implements the GTK
> accessibility API but that doesn't mean it directs the screen reader
> to say particular things. What it does is tell the accessibility API
> that it is dealing with text and provides ways for the accessibility
> tools to navigate and manipulate the text and discover aspects of it
> like colour. This code is in scintilla/gtk/ScintillaGTKAccessible.cxx.
> It's possible solve this problem?
>
> It may be possible to provide more information to the
> accessibility APIs or provide it in a different way but the effects
> are indirect and unpredictable.
>

Gigi:

main API accessibility is at-spi, actually is at version 2.50 about. It
provides to give informations about GTK events and allow assistive
tecnologies to work.


Thanks


Gigi

[Neil Hodgson]

Gigi:

main API accessibility is at-spi, actually is at version 2.50 about.

Scintilla uses at-spi through ATK which is a wrapper around at-spi from the GTK project.

https://docs.gtk.org/atk/index.html

Scintilla provides the Text and EditableText interfaces of ATK but that includes only a limited set of features. For example, there are 6 'signals' that Scintilla can send to notify listeners like screen readers that something has occurred in Scintilla and they are very broad - there's no way of differentiating between "cut" and "delete", for example.

text-attributes-changed
text-caret-moved
text-changed (deprecated in favour of text-insert and text-remove)
text-insert
text-remove
text-selection-changed

https://docs.gtk.org/atk/iface.Text.html

https://docs.gtk.org/atk/iface.EditableText.html

at-spi may provide features that are not made available through ATK and it might be possible to access these features.

Neil