Comment 1 by briang1 on 2014-02-26 14:51
But we already have more or less that, and two other modes where that is relevent surely? Or did I misunderstand what you meant. Doc review, Screen reaview and object review.
We used to have flat review, same thing different name.

Comment 2 by k_kolev1985 on 2014-02-26 15:02
Document review is only for virtual documents, and not for other screens. The screen review is similar to what I'm suggesting. Screen review however reads the screen top to bottom, left to right and only reads text information. As for what I'm suggesting - it will read object by object, witch is different. Maybe the flat review was something similar, but I'm not sure if it did read the screen object by object or only textual information. It is hard to explain - sorry.

Comment 3 by Palacee_hun on 2014-02-26 17:43
Believe me or not, you can already almost do what you want with NVDA. You have two gestures: move to the next/previous object in a flattened mode. By default these are assigned only to the touch screen oriented flick left/right, but nothing prevents you from assigning them to normal keyboard commands in the input gestures dialog. For example, I have assigned them to NVDA+Shift+left arrow and NVDA+Shift+right arrow respectively. They work great. You definitely get object information, and there's just one object level. The only thing is that movements are not limited to the active application window.

Comment 4 by jteh on 2014-02-26 22:13
comment:3 is correct. If you've used left/right flick gestures on a touch screen lately with NVDA, this is what you'll get. We should probably provide keyboard bindings too.

Comment 5 by k_kolev1985 on 2014-02-27 11:37
Yes, if keyboard bindings are added, that will be enough :). To be honest, although I've been playing with a touch screen device lately, I mostly used it with a keyboard and probably that is why I haven't noticed that the left and right flicks on the touch screen use flat object navigation. Actually, the main reason for me not noticing that fact is that even though I use the device's touch screen from time to time, I mainly use it with touch exploration and not with object navigation. Stupid me... :).

Comment 6 by briang1 on 2014-02-27 12:00
I think this needs sorting out then. Its adding a feature with minimal work. However care is going to be needed to make a combination that is not in use in any add on or other things I thought the suggested one was something else in laptop, so that might pose an issue.
Certainly where touch has a function not to be found on the keyboard this needs to be fixed I think.
I tried to add some bindings in the dialogue a while back but simply ended up losing some speech for some odd reason, so gave up in case i knackerd the install and had to start again. Finger trouble no doubt. I lost the folder view speech in Outlook express.

Comment 7 by nvdakor on 2014-03-01 09:58
Hi,
We may as well solve an issue where NVDA's touch navigation would be limited to the active app.
As for this one, I believe all we need to do would be to find a suitable command set and add them in globalComamnds.GlobalCommands gestures dictionary.
For gestures, I suggest NVDA+Shift+Numpad 6 for next flatten object navigation and NVDA+Shift+Numpad 4 for the reverse.

Comment 8 by nvdakor on 2015-03-23 20:47
Hi,
Coming back to this ticket...
If there is demand for this, I'll come up with a branch for this ticket that binds NVDA+Shift+numpad 4/6 to flattened object navigation commands like touchscreens. However, this can be done now - if you go to input gestures dialog and look under touch category, you'll see those commands (unless disalbed when NVDA is started).
Thanks.

@josephsl You seemed to suggest in #3931 (comment) that you may consider working on this ticket in the future. This is mostly just a friendly reminder to hopefully get around to working on this as and when time, circumstance and priorities permit.

Possibly related: #4100

Coming back to this, I think that it would be beneficial to have keyboard bindings for flattened object navigation indeed. Since shift+NVDA+pageUp and shift+NVDA+pageDown are still unassigned, I think it might make sense to use these for the laptop layout. For the Desktop layout, I'd like to suggest NVDA+numpad3 and NVDA+numpad9 for next and previous object, respectively.

Also this could be covered by locking object Navigation and assigning quick Navigation key like in browse mode.

see #7759

we already have the flows to shortcuts as part of touch screen nav. Would these work out?

Hi,

There are several solutions:

1. Assign commands suggested by @LeonarddeR: NVDA+page up/page down could work, although to me, it doesn't make sense. NVDA+arrows (NVDA+Shift+arrows on laptop layout) are already assigned to object navigation, and for most users, it is part of their muscle memory. As I suggested three years ago, NVDA+Shift+Numpad left/right arrows for flow command for desktop layout was what I was going to suggest, but then it doesn't work well for laptop layout (it also runs against personal philosophy of user experience consistency).
2. Add a setting in Review Cursor panel to control how next and previous object navigation should work. Default would be current behavior, and users can choose to enable flow method. The biggest benefit is that one can toggle this setting on per application basis (via configuration profiles), but the downside is redundant touchscreen gestures. One way to solve touch gesture problem is detecting gesture type (isinstance) and keep the original behavior if this is touch only. Also, in order to make this more effective, an unassigned toggle command should be added.

Thanks.

@josephsl commented on Jun 25, 2018, 12:46 AM MDT:

Hi,

There are several solutions:

1. Assign commands suggested by @LeonarddeR: NVDA+page up/page down could work, although to me, it doesn't make sense. NVDA+arrows (NVDA+Shift+arrows on laptop layout) are already assigned to object navigation, and for most users, it is part of their muscle memory.

Having trained various NVDA users in the past object navigation is not even close to intuitive to most users, especially unintuitive to non computer scientists. Most users sinply don't use object navigation out of frustration with using Object navigation. They'll listen to a whole dialog go by with NVDA+b for a good 30 seconds because object nav is so unintuitive. Something needs done about this.

As I suggested three years ago, NVDA+Shift+Numpad left/right arrows for flow command for desktop layout was what I was going to suggest, but then it doesn't work well for laptop layout (it also runs against personal philosophy of user experience consistency).

I respectfully prefer @LeonarddeR approach because it's a simpler keystroke.

2. Add a setting in Review Cursor panel to control how next and previous object navigation should work. Default would be current behavior, and users can choose to enable flow method. The biggest benefit is that one can toggle this setting on per application basis (via configuration profiles), but the downside is redundant touchscreen gestures. One way to solve touch gesture problem is detecting gesture type (isinstance) and keep the original behavior if this is touch only. Also, in order to make this more effective, an unassigned toggle command should be added.

I agree with this proposal, but per my comments above (with anecdotal evidence however) I think an flows to mode should be the default.

Initial request from @k-kolev1985 fixed in #15065.