trouble with CVS and a request for votes

[Charles Hallenbeck]

Hi Greg

On Fri, 28 Sep 2001, Gregory Nowak wrote:

> Is there a particuar factor anyway that would make speakup speak
> cursor movements in one editing enviornment, and not another?

I do not know the details of the source code well enough to say, but
evidently pico and nano handle screen output very differently, so that one
makes speakup say the char under the cursor when the cursor moves, and the
other does not. But you have to distinguish between cursor tracking and
speaking the current text as the cursor moves. Perhaps it has to do with
how an application chooses to show you the cursor. If it shows you the
cursor by brightening the char the cursor is on, perhaps by rewriting that
char to the screen, that should be easy to catch.

The situation in DOS was relatively easy compared to Linux. DOS has system
calls that tell you where the cursor is and what char is there. What I did
was for every key press to record the current cursor position befpre
[assomg tje cjar tp tje suste,. tjem waiting an arbitrary time and
checking the position again. If it moved from its original position, then
I did one of three things: (1) if it moved only one position, I pronounce
the char at the new location; (2) if it moved horizontally more than one
position, I read enough chars from the screen to isolate a 'word' and
pronounce that word; and (3) if it moved vertically, I read the line to
which it has moved. That was a good plan, but it meant capturing the key
stroke before the system gets it, as well as capturing data sent to the
screen, and coordinating the two.

I think there is room for improvement in the way speakup speaks the cursor
movements, since at present the way it does it varies from one application
to another, and it shouldn't do that. I am not an emacs user like Kirk is,
but I am told that emacs behaves even more friendly than nano does in that
respect. Hey Kirk, are you reading this? How about switching to pico for a
day or two so you can see how a weak application works? <smile>

Chuck



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