Topic by Munawar 2018-12-11 03:17:08

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I sent a message to the JAWS Email list recently about this, but my correspondence with FS itself suggests that this feature is unavailable (!)

JAWSList wrote:

In NVDA, you are able to set an option that will tell you how many tabs a line is indented by. Is there such a feature in JAWS?


I've checked out Speech and Sound Schemes but when I use the Visual Studio (Indent) scheme in Visual Studio, I don't hear tab indications. My code uses standard tabbing where each indent is one tab (not two, 4 or 8 spaces as presented in Speech and Sound Schemes.) I see the speech and sound option for one tab is 0.125 inches. Isn't this a "dangerous" implementation since it's based on a hard-coded tab width (which of course doesn't work in VS?)


It cant' be that a screen reader like this doesn't offer the ability to announce tabs, so can someone help me out here? How do I turn on tab announcements? I've recently switched back to JAWS after a few years away from it now that the pricing is more friendly and love what I'm seeing except for this one problem.

How do you Python developers get JAWS to announce your tabbing if you're not using the standard "Python way" to indent your code (IE: using one tab per indent versus 4 spaces?) I figured if anyone can answer this, it's a Python developer.

My question now is that since this feature doesn't exist in JAWS (again, (!)), it looks like if I want it, I'll have to script it. So, will anyone actually find this feature useful, before I embark on this project? Or should I just give up on JAWS again and stick with NVDA (don't worry, I haven't paid for JAWS yet.)

Download the Time Zoner NVDA add-on for announcing the time in different timezones
Download Three-D-Velocity and Treasure Hunt from my Github

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Reply by Ethin 2018-12-11 04:29:04

  • Ethin
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I have no idea how its done via NVDA, but I don't think it relies on hard-coded indentation values. I'd just stick with NVDA if JAWS doesn't provide that functionality, since I don't know how you'd script it.

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Reply by Victorious 2018-12-11 14:56:57

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Have you tried NVDA's indentation reporting by tones functionality? Its one of the major reasons why I use NVDA, because it gives you a similar intuition for how code looks that a sighted person would get.

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Reply by Munawar 2018-12-11 15:18:09

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@Ethin, I doubt it's hard-coded in NVDA, since once you turn tab announcements on it works beautifully no matter what editor you're in. For JAWS, it'll be simple enough to count the number of tabs from the left edge of the line and speak that using the JAWS message voice.

When I was in university, I was using Notepad++ a lot for some work I was doing at the time. I had scripted JAWS to announce tabs in Notepad++ only, and I was using it by monitoring the status line. I don't remember how but I used that information in some or other manner along with information about the current line to get tabbing information. Now that I think about it, it was rather "hacky" but it did work. I want to make my new implementation global though so that a JAWS user should be able to use it across all edit fields, not just ones that come with a useful status bar like Notepad++.

Download the Time Zoner NVDA add-on for announcing the time in different timezones
Download Three-D-Velocity and Treasure Hunt from my Github

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