Flexible ring of settings

[Adriani90]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open a document with several formating atributes (i.e. different cell Colors in a table, different text Fonts etc)
2. Navigate through the text and identify separately green cells, then part of Areal text, then indentations etc.

Expected behavior:
The user should have the flexibility to add or remove settings from the ring to optimize its way of productivity. In this case, document formating Settings should be added to the ring. When sellecting one Setting of this cathegory (i.e. Colors), Colors should be reported when navigating through the document.

Actual behavior:
The ring of settings has not changed since many years although it is one of the most significant advantage of NVDA compared to other screen readers. In this case, users have to go to the document formating Settings and check or uncheck the coresponding Settings every time.

System configuration:
NVDA version:
all

NVDA Installed or portable:
both

Other information:

Windows version:
all

Name and version of other software in use when reproducing the issue:
all

Other questions:

Does the issue still occur after restarting your PC?
yes

Have you tried any other versions of NVDA?
yes, all

[ehollig]

Could this be accomplished with configuration profiles? For example, you could have one profile announce font size and font attributes while another profile had these disabled. Then, with implementation of #4209, you could press a keystroke to switch between the manual activated profiles. Leaning to a close in favor of #4209

[Adriani90]

Hello, this would not solve the problem since you would have to define which font and which color should be activated for which profile. This is far to complicated for an usual user since you have to do lots of settings for each profile. There are to many keystrokes on the market at this point. Narator has hundreeds, jaws as well and now NVDA as well. I think the best way is to adjust the settings ring. Or is it not possible from a programming perspective? Best Adriani Von: Ethan Holliger [mailto:notifications@github.com] Gesendet: Montag, 13. November 2017 19:48 An: nvaccess/nvda <nvda@noreply.github.com> Cc: Adriani90 <adriani.botez@googlemail.com>; Author <author@noreply.github.com> Betreff: Re: [nvaccess/nvda] Flexible ring of settings (#7747) Could this be accomplished with configuration profiles? For example, you could have one profile announce font size and font attributes while another profile had these disabled. Then, with implementation of #4209 <#4209> , you could press a keystroke to switch between the manual activated profiles. Leaning to a close in favor of #4209 <#4209> — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#7747 (comment)> , or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/Aaon8bha9heuGFCOg_HrEBURUG2UzmjFks5s2I7cgaJpZM4Qa1lJ> . <https://github.com/notifications/beacon/Aaon8XHbvh6gziyzG9tZBeN34RNRPO6Pks5s2I7cgaJpZM4Qa1lJ.gif>

[Adriani90]

Slightly edited

[derekriemer]

@Adriani90 commented on Dec 21, 2017, 6:43 AM MST:

Slightly edited

This will just add a ton of items to the ring, how will this objectively make this easier for the user?

[Adriani90]

It would then be user‘s decision how many items are confortable for certain tasks. Moreover, it would give more flexibility, i.e. in implementing #7744 Von meinem iPhone gesendet

…

Am 04.01.2018 um 04:55 schrieb Derek Riemer ***@***.***>: @Adriani90 commented on Dec 21, 2017, 6:43 AM MST: Slightly edited This will just add a ton of items to the ring, how will this objectively make this easier for the user? — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[LeonarddeR]

I have the feeling that adding settings to a ring might only complicate things even more. Don't you think that having a separate quick navigation layer for this kind of information could be much more effective?

[Adriani90]

@LeonarddeR I really like the idea with an additional layer for quick navigation. I am really thinking about closing this one in favor of your idea. But I still think the settings ring is the best option at least for navigation by colors in MS Excel (i.e. as requested in #7744). Lot of users often deal with big tables which contain cells with different colors in Excel or even pdfs with revisions directly saved from MS Word. if you want to work very efficient with such files you have to navigate by certain colors (i.e. from red cell to red cell or from purple text to purple text). Do you have an alternative idea how to implement such a feature?

[JulienCochuyt]

Regarding easy navigation to any specific formatting, please see #9527 (comment)

Regarding the settings ring, I'd like to propose the following improvements:

1. Add a way to configure which values are available for some of the settings.

Eg. speech language selection with espeak offers so many choices that it is pretty tedious to switch between commonly used ones using the ring.

2. Offer more settings rings than just speech

We could imagine changing rings with NVDA+control+pageUp/pageDown (desktop) and NVDA+control+shift+pageUp/pageDown (laptop)
Candidates could include (listed in order of priority via gut feeling):

• Document Formatting settings
• Keyboard settings (all but choice of NVDA keys)
• Mouse settings
• Object Presentation
• Browse Mode (needs a way to refresh the currently focused document without causing a page reload on some browsers)
• Input Composition
• Review Cursor

I'm not sure Braille settings would make much sense, what do you think?

3. Help newcomers by appending announce of gestures

When a setting has a dedicated gesture, appending the announce made when moving through settings in a given ring would help newcomers discover them.
When a setting category has a dedicated gesture, appending the announce made when moving through rings might also help.

4. Add a "user" ring,

Rather than adding a way to configure which settings are proposed in each of the rings listed in 2. we might consider adding a user ring for quick access at user's will.

What do you think?