Hey folks,
Item just came up on my list and I've got an IDEA on how it should be
addressed, but I'd love feedback. Visual Studio provides "outlining" which
allows the user to collapse or expand regions of code for ease of navigation.
For instance consider the following (I'm including line numbers for
understanding)
17 LineBeforeRegion()
18 #region MySample
19 CodeInRegion()
20 #endregion
21 LineAfterRegion()
In Visual Studio, you can use Ctrl+M, Ctrl+M to toggle outlining. If you were
to do that on line 18 here, the sighted user would see:
17 LineBeforeRegion()
18 MySample
21 LineAfterRegion()
However, line 18 would have a visual adorner to show that it's a collapsed
region. It's a single atomic unit, you can't use the cursor keys to navigate
into it or anything like that.
The issue is that the visual adorner on line 18 is not actually part of the
text buffer so it's completely invisible to the screen reader. To a screen
reader user, this code is more like:
17 LineBeforeRegion()
18
21 LineAfterRegion()
Which is probably quite frustrating. (If anyone has run into this, you can use
Ctrl+M, Ctrl+L to toggle ALL outlining, which will expand everything. You can
also use Ctrl+M, Ctrl+P to expand all the regions and disable outlining
altogether).
Now to my question. I want to fix this issue. What would folks want to hear on
line 18? I don't want to just say "MySample" since it would sound like code and
be indistinguishable. I hesitate to say "Begin Collapsed Region MySample End
Collapsed Region" since that feels like overkill. For the record, it is
possible to have a collapsed region in the middle of text, so if you were to
try really hard you could have
18 SomeCode() CollapsedRegion SomeOtherCode()
Where "CollapsedRegion" is a collapsed region, but the SomeCode() and
SomeOtherCode() is legitimate code.
I should also point out that the Region identifiers won't be navigable by
character or anything, so right now, it's effectively a single character. We
are looking into a better fix there, but there are a lot of issues with that
(e.g. what happens if you're inside one of those regions and type a letter.
What would that do?).
I currently don't have a solution better than saying "Collapsed: identifier",
realizing that the string might have code before or after that would be rather
ambiguous. So, that's what I'm going to currently go with. But if folks have
something they think would be more useful, I would love to hear it.
As always, thanks for whatever advice you're willing to give!
--Dante
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