[NFBCS] Linux Screen Readers

[Doug Lee]

The Alt+Del command works as long as JAWS' idea of cursor position is accurate. See below for more on
determining if this is the case. That said, I don't use numeric positions to line up code; I just arrow up and
down and then left and right to test for first non-space character on lines of interest. On the fairly rare
occasion I need to count indent levels, I do it with Left and Right arrows. In Vim, there's no line wrap and a
beep occurs at ends of lines.

If any custom scripts I use do anything relevant to this discussion, they improve JAWS' ability to pinpoint the
cursor. If your JAWS fails to do that, you will find the PC cursor parked somewhere consistently instead of
following along as you do things. The reason I'm not sure if my scripts affect this on my machine is that they do a
number of other things that I use every day. The reason I haven't shared them is that they are very specific to me;
for example, they provide commands for querying SoX sound playback status in real time, a few Mutt-specific
commands based on my rather customized Mutt screen format, and contain commands relevant to IRC though I don't use
that very often anymore.

As for pasting: To get text from the window, I usually just get JAWS to say it and then use Speech History,
Insert+Space H, and clip it from there to the Windows clipboard. You can also get the entire console display
memory with the sequence Insert+Space E S Enter, then paste that into Notepad and edit as needed.

On Mon, Aug 22, 2022 at 08:15:44AM -0700, Brian Buhrow wrote:
	hello Doug.  You're really close to what I am looking for, but maybe I don't entirely
understand.  For vim, it sounds like the status line at the bottom will give you  the current
line number and column number of the file you're in; that's good for writing code and being
able to check your indentation and to see if things line up properly when you're formatting
tabular output.  And, for things like mutt and lynx the cat, the -show_cursor flag is very
helpful.  The thing that you say that's a bit concerning to me is that you say, perhaps I
scripted it years ago with Jaws, making me think you're using  an extension you wrote for Jaws
that has become part of your everyday kit; something that stil doesn't ship with Jaws for
everyone else.  In another part of your message you say that Jaws can give you a pretty good
idea of where things are on the screen and you say that older versions of jaws could only give
you pixel position , but now it can give you character positions.  That's an improvement, but
how precise is it?  Could you use it to check the output of a command that shows tabular data
and know what lines up with what?

	Another feature I use everyday, which isn't part of my screen reader, but is vital to my
work is the ability to cut and paste bits of text with high levels of accuracy.  In my
experience, it is very difficult to select and copy text from the Windows cmd window using Jaws
or NVDA.  I can usually get blocks of text, which I have to paste into Notepad for editing
before I paste the text into its final destination.  that's a cumbersome extra step I don't
have to perform in my native Unix environment.  Since I assume this is a vital part of any
person's everyday work, I'm wondering how you accomplish this task using the native cmd window,
Jaws and ssh?

	I'm happy to hear that, with newer versions of Jaws, it sounds like the state of terminal
access is improving.  

-Brian

-- 
Doug Lee                 dgl at dlee.org                http://www.dlee.org
"You must let me try, for a true soldier does not admit defeat before
the battle."
--Helen Keller (in a letter to the president of Radcliffe College)