keystrokes: to speak or not to speak

[Kirk Reiser]

Well I can't give you much advise about vi/vim because I'm an emacs
user.  I can explain however the basic cursoring within speakup.
Originally speakup didn't try to speak anything to do with cursoring
except saying the character before it was overwritten with a space
which is how the kernel does a backspace.  It moves the current cursor
to it's previous horizontal position and then overwrites that video
memory position with a space character.  What happens in editors is
not necessarily done the same way and many more things go on with
every key stroke.  Speakup links the reading cursor to the actual
cursor in each screen unless specifically told not to with the park
key.  However, key strokes and cursor movements are totally different
things and so it is very difficult to talk about them as the same
thing.  Every application determines what it will do with key strokes
so making a general action for any key stroke is very hard.  In
speakup we have only dealt with the basic four key strokes of right
and left arrow movement and up and down arrow movement.  Even there
though we do not handle it very well because for example moving the
cursor down with the down arrow will mean move to the next line in an
editor but move to the next link in a web browser, so you see you have
no absolutes as to how a key should be handled.  If anyone can come up
with a set of more general rules how to handle various cursor
movements and key strokes please let me know.  This is a popular topic
because everybody seems to have an opinion on how it should be done
but nobody has come up with a set of general rules we can apply and
will work in all cases, or even the majority of cases.  I think we
need some sort of configuration system so that we could redefine how
key strokes and window areas could be handled in different
applications but I'm not close to having time to write it so it won't
happen soon.

  Kirk

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Kirk Reiser				The Computer Braille Facility
e-mail: kirk at braille.uwo.ca		University of Western Ontario
phone: (519) 661-3061