keystrokes: to speak or not to speak

[propaine]

Kirk, thanks nonetheless for the information you did provide.  Time will
tell, but I want to get good enough with Linux that I can work on such
things.

Propaine
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kirk Reiser" <kirk at braille.uwo.ca>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Saturday, May 20, 2006 12:40 PM
Subject: Re: keystrokes: to speak or not to speak


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