Report Current Line: trailing Spaces not Announced

[elliott94]

When using the Read Current Line command, NVDA does not currently output any information about the presence of spaces; if a user wants to find out if any exist within Focus Mode, they either have to use Object Navigation or move the System Caret. Would it be possible to add this information to the output given when this command is used?

[jcsteh]

I don't think we should do this. We don't do it when reading by line with the up and down arrow keys. Note, however, that you can easily get this information by pressing read current line twice, which will "spell" the line, including spaces.

[elliott94]

I apologise; I should have been way more clear on this, reading it back it doesn't even make sense to myself!

I was referring to the fact that if the command is pressed twice (i.e. to spell the content of a line), if there is a space without a proceeding character that it'll currently be ignored without any feedback given whatsoever. I can't remember if this was also the case for 2015.3; I can test if that would help.

Again, apologies for the initial description!

[jcsteh]

Can you please provide an example and exact steps to reproduce? I don't understand the issue.

[elliott94]

Sure - try the following:

1. Go to the Address Bar in Firefox, and clear any content that may already be in the field.
2. Type the text "test ", ensuring that the trailing space is present.
3. Activate the command to read the current line twice; this should result in NVDA reading the content, character-by-character. When it gets to the last "T" of the word, you should notice that it stops there rather than also announcing the space that is present.

I should note that this appears to happen in all applications; I simply used firefox as an example.

[ruifontes]

Hello!

Testing with Windows 7 and NVDA Next, and Windows 10 and NVDA 2015.4.
All spaces are read except if space is the last character.

Rui Fontes

-----Mensagem Original-----
From: elliott94
Sent: Tuesday, December 8, 2015 6:09 PM
To: nvaccess/nvda
Subject: Re: [nvda] Report Current Line: Spaces not Announced (#5587)

Sure - try the following:

Go to the Address Bar in Firefox, and clear any content that may already be
in the field.

Type the text "test ", ensuring that the trailing space is present.

Activate the command to read the current line twice; this should result in
NVDA reading the content, character-by-character. When it gets to the last
"T" of the word, you should notice that it stops there rather than also
announcing the space that is present.

I should note that this appears to happen in all applications; I simply used
firefox as an example.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[jcsteh]

Confirmed. Thanks for the additional info.

[elliott94]

No worries. Should this be reopened and the Wontfix label removed?

Thanks.

[ehollig]

Taking a look at spellTextInfo in Speech.py, is this intentional? CC @jcsteh

[jcsteh]

This was done in 5af277a:

speech.speakSpelling: strip all whitespace characters from the right of the string to be spelled. This means when spelling words, or spelling a line in dos windows etc, you will no longer hear many spaces after the characters in the actual word/line.

To elaborate on those two examples:

1. A "word" in NVDA generally includes the word plus the space after it. This is so that pressing next word moves to the next written word, rather than to the space after the current word. If we didn't strip trailing space in this case, spelling most words would read a trailing space.
2. In command consoles, all lines have a fixed length (e.g. 80 characters). If there are only 5 characters to display on a line, the remaining 75 are spaces. This is just how it is implemented under the hood. If we didn't strip trailing space in this case, spelling most lines would result in a lot of trailing spaces being read.

This is going to be tricky to fix. I guess speak spelling would need to avoid stripping spaces if spelling by line in most cases, but this would need to be overridden by command consoles. We should still strip spaces when spelling words.