Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Key Activated Mouse Tracking #4977

Open
nvaccessAuto opened this issue Mar 17, 2015 · 2 comments
Open

Key Activated Mouse Tracking #4977

nvaccessAuto opened this issue Mar 17, 2015 · 2 comments

Comments

@nvaccessAuto
Copy link

Reported by zkrsiher on 2015-03-17 09:52
I'm approaching NVDA from a low vision perspective.

I know this is not the mane use case for NVDA, but bare with me.

I'm thinking of users that are using the built in Windows Magnifier or a magnification only version of ZoomText, Magic etc...

Low Vision users on the lower spectrum of the low vision scale often need to supplement magnification with speech output to avoid eye fatigue.

A low vision user will use the mouse to operate windows but will need Mouse tracking to confirm the identity of a button or to tackle long texts.

This is where mouse tracking comes into play.

However mouse tracking is an all or nothing toggle, and when it's on NVDA reads anything the mouse moves over as you move across the screen.
This results in a cacophony of irrelevant output as you're moving from one location to another.

I suggest adding a modifier key option to the mouse tracking feature.

NVDA will read the text under the mouse when a modifier key is pressed.

Another issue is that the smallest movement can cause mouse tracking to either restart reading the same text or switch to a different text.

I suggest that once a user lets go of the modifier key NVDA will continue reading the last text even if the mouse is moved.

@LeonarddeR
Copy link
Collaborator

I agree that the all or nothing behaviour is a bit, well, all or nothing. It would indeed help if you would be able to have mouse tracking enabled but only report what is under the mouse by demand.

@DrSooom
Copy link

DrSooom commented May 17, 2020

In other words the Mouse Tracking checkbox will be replaced by a combobox with the following three entries:

  1. Track everything = Same behavior if Mouse Tracking is enabled in NVDA 2020.1.
  2. Only track while the NVDA key is pressed = That's new.
    Expected behavior: Even the speech output is disabled, the element behind the mouse cursor is spoken as long as the NVDA key is pressed and the mouse moved. After the NVDA key has been released, the TTS is still speaking the currently read text, but the Mouse Tracking is stopping immediately, so upcoming mouse movements no longer interrupts the speaking.
  3. Track nothing = Same behavior if Mouse Tracking is disabled in NVDA 2020.1.

Notes:

  • zkrsiher already described this behavior, but I tried to bring this in a better form for developers. Well, and I extended it a little bit to make it more user-friendly.
  • Due to the Drag&Drop feature, other modifier keys like CTRL or Shift aren't possible here.
  • The SayAll procedure can also enable the TTS by using a configuration profile. However for the future we will need more options to define when NVDA should speak something and when it should be quiet. But this isn't the topic here. So implementing the above feature request may solve some bothersome NVDA specifics for magnifier users, but not all.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

4 participants