[nvda] Re: Some random thoughts

I'm not sure I understand what would happen if just a title were spoken. It isn't clear to me what NVDA would say when an unknown window is encountered. As far as just announcing the name of a program when you open one or alt tab to one, just the title is all the information necessary. However, I can't tell how this would affect cases other than that. My main concern in the discussion wasn't whether pane was spoken. I was trying to make a broader point and just using that as an example. I was under the impression that a pane refers to a window or if a window is divided into two panes, like a help system, that each pane was part of one window but it was divided into two panes. I had thought, therefore, that the Notepad window would have been defined as a window with one pane. If this is incorrect, then perhaps someone will explain this. Whatever the case, in terms of just talking about the main window of an application, just the title is all the information necessary.

Gene
----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Curran" <mick@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, February 25, 2008 10:50 PM
Subject: [nvda] Re: Some random thoughts


Hi,

I'm a little confused about this thread. What was the original issue? I gather it had something to do with pane being spoken too many times, or in what was perceived to be the wrong places?

As Jamie has noted, Most of the panes you hear in NVDA (such as when a new application window becomes active, or when you focus on what seems to be an unknown control) is not really a pane. In fact originally in the first ever revisions of NVDA, these situations would be announced as client.

So if you  gave focus to Notepad, it would have said:
untitled - notepad client.

The word client is something quite specific to MSAA, and is the generic term for the main object of a window.

It was shown that many people on the list back then didn't like the word client, although that was being the most truthful to MSAA. I then mapped client to window:
untitled - notepad window

As if a client is the main object of a window, and NVDA doesn't really ever say window in any other situation, I thought it would be the best way to go.

So in this case, it would say window on foreground changes, and it would also say window for any window where its main object had no specific type information (as in MSAA did not know if it was a button, dialog, edit field etc).

I myself liked the way of doing things, as 1. it did not use the word client (which was rather confusing to those who didn't know what the term meant). 2. It was more true in general terms to what it was (the main part of a 'window') and 3. it did not conflict with other things such as objects that are really a pane, such as in help systems etc.

For some reason, as we changed NVDA to use the new roles and states code (From around April last year) we decided to instead map client to pane, instead of window. This was probably my decision, I can't remember.

So, the questions really are:
*When NVDA sees an object with a role of client (this is main application windows, or any window with an incomplete MSAA implementation), should NVDA say client, pane, Window... what should it be? *When an application window receives focus (or to be more true, when the foreground changes), should NVDA speak the role at all? or just the name.
e.g.
untitled - notepad

Rather than
untitled - notepad window
or
untitled - notepad pane

Mick

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