[NFBCS] NVDA addon: Community feedback on new Developer toolkit feature requested

[Andy Borka]

Hi,
I am requesting the community’s feedback on a feature for Developer toolkit. Before proceeding with the new feature’s description, I must provide a sample problem a user might encounter while using DTK. Imagine you are a user of DTK. You wish to make a dialog in the top-right corner of your display with a button centered in the dialog. The dialog is to have the dimensions of 100px wide and 100px high. The button is to have the dimensions of 75px wide and 25px high. You know the display resolution is 1920px wide and 1080px high.
You confidently code up the dialog to sit in the top-right corner of the display. To verify, you launch the dialog, turn on DTK, navigate to the dialog, then obtain its size and location. After checking the size and location, you are happy with its placement: (left, top, right, bottom): 1820, 0, 1920, 100 [100px wide and 100px high]. You proceed to place a button in the dialog. To verify the button’s size and location, you launch the dialog, put focus on the button, turn on DTK features, and obtain the button’s size and location. To your horror, the location is (left, top, right, bottom): 1820, 0, 1904, 25) [75px wide and 25px high]. It is a reasonable guess that the button is in the top-left corner of the dialog. However, you might have to perform some math to figure it out. Now, imagine what this would look like with a fairly complex design or layout… Messy at best! The problem is that all object locations are reported relative to the entire display. This method is useful for gross layouts such as setting up foreground window placement, or header, footer, multicolumn website layouts. Even the web layouts provide their own issues. Wait though, there is a solution to the problem!
The proposed feature I would like comments on is the ability for DTK to provide location information relative to the focused object’s parent. In the example given, you could ask DTK to give you the locations of the left, top, right, and bottom edges based on the distance between the focused object and its parent’s edges. For instance, DTK would report the button location as (left, top, right, bottom): 0, 0, 75, 25. You could still obtain locations based on the entire display’s size though. Implementing this isn’t difficult, but I need feature requests and implementation ideas from a user’s point of view. How would you see this feature implemented?



Sent from Mail for Windows 10