Make reporting of table cell coordinates configurable

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Reported by Kevan_GC on 2010-06-19 04:03
Sometimes when i'm in a table on the internet it keeps saying the column numbers and row numbers, and it gets annoying. Can you make it so it says the column and row numbers after the text in the cell and not before it?

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Comment 1 by jteh on 2010-06-19 06:05
This has worked in the past, although I did make some changes in 78daa96 which broke Flash virtual buffers. I've now fixed this in 986d29d.

Please clarify the problem you are experiencing. I think you might be misunderstanding the way you access Flash in NVDA, which is a bit different to how you do it in other screen readers. When you encounter an embedded object, you must press enter on it to interact with it. This is documented in the user guide.

Note that you sometimes have to press tab after pressing enter. If this is the problem you're referring to, this is a bug in Flash which we need to work around in NVDA.

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Comment 2 by Kevan_GC on 2010-06-19 08:36
Thanks. It works.
Changes:
Changed title from "When there's an embeded object aka a flash player object on a page, it doesn't work." to "The column and row numbers in a table"

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Comment 3 by jteh on 2010-06-20 00:07
It's probably not ideal to completely morph a ticket to a completely unrelated issue like this.

Reading this information after the content is contrary to the way NVDA handles all other formatting/control information in documents. If you don't want table information read, you can disable it from Document Formatting settings. I'm leaving this open in case we consider it at some point in the future, but it's certainly very low priority.

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Comment 4 by orcauser on 2010-09-20 23:25
Sorry for adding to a highjacked ticket, but since we are at it.

Several users have expressed the intrest to have the ability to enable/disable the announcement of rows/columns in a table.
By disabling tables in virtual buffers or changing the table settings in document formatting settings, they dont get any indication that there are tables. What is wanted is announcement of existance of table, but not ro/column count. Could an option to toggle announcement be added to the interface?

Thank you.

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Comment 5 by Shaimaa on 2011-04-29 09:33
nvda should not always announce coloumn and row numbers. there should be an option for enabling or disableing this announcement as it exists in the layout tables. we should have a shortcut to announce the current row and column in case the user needs it in a particular table but keeping it like this always slows user's work. I suggest that we can use the microsoft word shortcuts to be easier for users to memorize them. In all cases, NVDA should indicate if there is a table on the page at least for 1 time.

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Attachment 719-1.patch added by orcauser on 2011-05-19 14:22
Description:

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Comment 6 by orcauser on 2011-05-19 14:31
hi,

This bug seems to cause a lot of irritation for some of the users that require less verbosity, and we get regular complaints about this on the arabic mailing list, havent checked the english support list.

Attached is a small patch which addresses the issue.
Works for me in ff, I'm sorry if I've overlooked anything. (not tested in word/flash, or other places where we may have virtual buffers.
Developing on a minimal install virtual windows xp machine so havent installed much.

Points of discussion:

1. What should the shortcut be for reading current cell coordinates? (at the moment it is nvda+r)
2. The changes in getSpeechForTextProperties, maybe the decision to include coordinates should not only be based on reportTableCellCords, but maybe also the current reason, and if so, which?

Thank you for your feedback.

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Comment 7 by jteh on 2011-05-19 21:12
Just an initial thought. It seems inconsistent to have a shortcut just for reading table cell coordinates, since we don't have one for reading any other field info. For example, there's no way to ask whether you're in a list, a frame, etc. This also sets a precedent for introducing commands to read very small pieces of information like this. However, it might make sense to merge this into the report formatting command (NVDA+f).

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Comment 8 by orcauser on 2011-05-20 07:50
One way that seems to work quite well for controling verbosity of Orca, is that we have a 'where-am-i' key, which depending on context, gives you relevant information.
This includes, position in list/radio buttons, cell cords in tables, read only state of edit text areas, etc. This key is separate from the font information key.

Maybe putting in cell cords into nvda+f would start a functionality creap, and people would ask for more information to be made available using this method.

If you wish we can remove the shortcut for now, and consider how this sort of information should be provided as part of a different ticket.

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Attachment 719-2.patch added by orcauser on 2011-06-01 17:23
Description:

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Comment 10 by Shaimaa on 2011-06-08 07:38
Dear team, sorry to be pushy, is there any update on this ticket?
It is important for many of our users that this gets resolved for the next release if possible.
The number of Arabic NVDA users are increasing daily and this is a regular complaint on our list.
Thank you for your understanding.

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Comment 11 by jteh on 2011-06-08 08:11
I don't see this as priority for 2011.2. It is a minor annoyance at best and disabling reporting of tables should be an acceptable solution for most users. There's generally no need to know that there is a table present if you don't care about row/column coordinates. It's also not specific to Arabic.

Even if this did get implemented, we would not implement the shortcut to report coordinates initially, since how best to do this has not yet been decided.

Mick, thoughts?

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Comment 12 by Shaimaa on 2011-06-08 08:52
Yes for sure, the user needs to know if there is a table. It is so important and practical in jumping between different sections on the website like the case for headings, lists and forms.
The tables are really important to be identified in webpages like gmail inbox or following certain data to make navigation easier and faster for the user, so disabling this option from the document formatting dialogue will not allow the user to navigate between tables and he will not know if they exist, In the meantime, the user doesn't need to be irritated all the time by hearing the row/column numbers.
There is already an attempt to add this enhancement to NVDA so why not to be tested and added or modified if needed. No worries about certain shortcuts but yes the user needs to know where he is. You sometimes find yourself in a very large tables on a webpage and you need to know this info to visualize and follow up with the table.
I'm actually aware that the problem is not only related to Arabic users but this is the community I'm familiar with and I'm just sharing their thoughts and inquiries.
Thanks for your time

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Comment 13 by jteh on 2011-06-08 09:32
Okay. We're almost ready to close this release. However, I'd be willing to take configurable table coords reporting if it's ready in the next few days, but not the report coords command. That should be done as a follow up and probably won't be done for a while.

@orcauser: Thanks for the patch. A bit of code review:

1. tableCellCords should be spelt tableCellCoords.
2. !VirtualBuffer.script_getTableCellCords should be removed. (I see you removed the binding, but not the script.)
3. Although I understand why you did this, speech.getSpeechTextForProperties is not the correct place to disable reporting of headers if disabled. That function shouldn't check config, as it is very low level and NVDA needs a way to override the config in certain cases. This should instead be done in speech.speakObject and speech.getControlFieldSpeech, similar to the way we handle reportTables/reportTableHeaders.
   Changes:
   Milestone changed from None to 2011.2

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Attachment 719-3.patch added by orcauser on 2011-06-08 14:10
Description:

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Comment 14 by orcauser on 2011-06-08 14:12
Thanks guys for the discussion and feedback.

Jamie, 1,2,3 are done, but i had to introduce a new variable to getSpeechTextForProperties, namely includeCoords.
The reason for this is that the row/column numbers are needed for the checking if we are still in the same cell, but the user may not always want them to be spoken.

Please see attached patch.

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Comment 15 by jteh on 2011-06-10 09:28
Mesar, thanks for the updated patch. I've made a few changes:

1. I renamed includeCoords to includeTableCellCoords for clarity.
2. I fixed some small bugs.
3. I made some cosmetic/code styling changes. In particular, for future reference regarding NVDA code, please use brackets when breaking code across multiple lines rather than a trailing backslash. Thanks.

There's still one bug I'm trying to fix. In focus mode, the word "cell" is read when report table cell coordinates is disabled when a cell is encountered while tabbing around. This is unfortunately much trickier to fix (without breaking other things) than it seems. :)

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Comment 16 by jteh on 2011-06-14 02:28
0c3483b
Changes:
State: closed

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Comment 17 by jteh on 2011-06-14 02:31
Changes:
Changed title from "The column and row numbers in a table" to "Make reporting of table cell coordinates configurable"