AkelEdit feature request: Ability to get sentence boundaries

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AkelEdit feature request: Ability to get sentence boundaries

Post by pvagner »

Hello,
I think the subject says it all.
Many controls except of plain edit controls are able to give sentence offsets. We developing NVDA an open-source screen reading application for windows are relying on it to provide continuous reading by sentence. Initially I've started to think about implementing something in our code to handle this but I have recently discoveret there are just simple edit controls suffering from this. Even richedit can expose sentence boundaries while using itextdocument interface.
Since NVDA is written in python implementing something like this might be more eficient in the control it-self. Also I believe I am not the only one who may benefit of such a feature in AkelEdit.
I think Sentence has to start with capital letter and it might end in one of the ?! followed by nothing or one of "')]} and other types of quotes and braces and finally followed by whitespaces.
Can you tell me your thoughts at least please?

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Post by Sam_Zen »

Ah. I didn't realize until I checked NVDA. This is also about accessability and screenreading.
I'm not visually impaired myself, but I have years of experience about these aspects, due to inet-conversations with a friend.
So I know, when writing a mail, I just have to type on without linefeeds one complete sentence until the final dot, to make it easy for the screenreader.
And I'm aware of the things about special characters, spaces, etcetera. Application development should be aware of this too.
This friend has made of lot of related things about this :
http://vtatila.kapsi.fi/index.html

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Post by pvagner »

Sam_Zen wrote:So I know, when writing a mail, I just have to type on without linefeeds one complete sentence until the final dot, to make it easy for the screenreader.
Do not take it wrong please, but let me add like sighted people blindies are also different from person to person when it comes to their habits. Many email clients are using native controls so reading by sentence is not a problem. While skimming a bit of text or a bit of an email message it's good to be able to navigate by line. A the other hand when screen reader is used to do a continuos reading of the text as a whole it is nice to be able to detect sentence boundaries so the speech is not interrupted at the line boundaries and intonation is not screwed after passing the text to the synthesis engine.
I just think I should clear it a bit what I am looking for. I just would like to have an API to be able to retrieve sentence offset the same what we are able to do for line offsets as well as for the word offsets. Although it might be nice to be able to navigate by sentence as well but this is not such a problem I can try making plugin for this when AkelEdit will support sentence boundaries detection.
Sam_Zen wrote:Application development should be aware of this too.
This friend has made of lot of related things about this :
http://vtatila.kapsi.fi/index.html
Yeah I see these pages as a well written material with a lot of personal experiences expressed in a understandable way.
Thanks Sam Zen for your comment. At least it gives me a feeling you won't mind supporting these little accessibility tweaks when it's known it does not affect other things.
Actually I feel a bit of joy reading such a comments because sometimes it's not straight forwart to get accessibility issues recognized in the communities where accessibility is not maintained from the ground.
Anyway instructor is already aware of the fact AkelPad dialogs and menus are all very accessible because of the fact being native to windows operating system. AkelEdit is the place where I may request a few more things as I'll identify them.
Thanks all. Incredible speed, great community, extensibility and accessibility these are things why I do like AkelPad. So keep it going please.

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Post by Sam_Zen »

At least it gives me a feeling you won't mind supporting these little accessibility tweaks when it's known it does not affect other things
Nothing litlte about this. These aspects should be taken into thorough consideration when makin some script.
Of course personal ways of reading has to be taken into account in the options.
OT: In the meantime I'm amazed about the speed, non-visual readers are able to follow their screen-reader.
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