2018-11-02 23:14:17

I wrote an Interactive Fiction authoring system that lets you create and play text adventure games. I want to make it work with screenreaders on different platforms (windows, linux, OSX).

I have the following issue with NVDA on Windows 10. My application runs in a CMD window. It prints text messages that are printed as lines of maximum 80 characters. After 80 characters (or the last whole word that fits in 80 characters) it prints a carriage return and continues on the next line.

What happens is that after the lines are printed, NVDA starts reading the lines, but it pauses at the end of each line before it continues with the next.

I found that when I back up to the first line of a paragraph with keypad1 and then hit kepad+ the paragraph is read as single continuous text.

So my question: is there a way to tell NVDA that it must read each paragraph as if keypad+ was selected?


Thanks for reading.

2018-11-03 22:54:17

I'm not aware of a way to do this. If there are newlines between lines, they won't be recognised as part of a single paragraph. What you did is a say all, which reads everything, not just a paragraph. I don't think this is really a problem though, if time isn't important and you can scroll back to review the text without worrying that you're wasting time or missing something then I really doubt anyone's going to have an issue with it. Also, you may already know this, but you can use numpad 7 and 9 to navigate by lines and 4 and 6 to navigate by words, which is much quicker than navigating by character with 1 and 3.

2018-11-04 13:28:47

Sorry, I meant to write that I backed up with keypad7, not keypad1.

Strange thing is that I wanted to post the sample text here so you could hear for yourself, but in this text pane it reads the whole text without waiting at the end of the line. Just as I wanted. Maybe it reads a CMD window different than it reads a browser.

A possible explanation can be that in a CMD window you typically have dos command outputs like directory listings and you want these to be read line by line and not as a story text.
But if this is the case I would expect a setting in preferences to override it.