Dear All,
I'm a newbie to Window-Eyes--considering making the switch since both of my
braille displays (a HandyTech Braille Wave, and a GWMicro SyncBraille 20) have
been 'orphaned' by the company who makes the screen reader I've been using in
one form or another for the past two decades. One of the things I will miss
from the old screen reader is the AutoAdvance feature, which allows users to
automatically read through text using a braille display without having to press
the scroll key thousands of times a day. For those of us who use a VoiceSense
and SyncBraille, this is a feature built in to VoiceSense, but it doesn't seem
to have made its way into Window-Eyes yet. So, I decided to take a day last
weekend and write a script to do this. It may be a bit of a kludge, but it
works perfectly for what I need it to do--and it was great fun to dig into
Window-Eyes scripting and make something useful that works. I'm not really
interested in developing it any further, so I thought I'd pass it along to
those of you who have more script-writing experience and more time than I do.
Hopefully someone on this list will be interested in developing it further,and
packaging it up to post on Script-Central. I unfortunately don't have the
time. but I'm happy with it, it's worked fine for the last week without
crashing or causing any problems, and it does exactly what I need.
I'll include the script, below, and then afterwards I'll include a few notes
and comments about ways I think it could be improved. I've used comment lines
fairly liberally to document how it works and what each block of code does, so
it should be pretty transparent. Basically, autoscroll initiates with
ctrl-shift-q on the keyboard, and is terminated by the ESC key. Spacebar speeds
up the scrolling in tenth-of-a-second increments, and backspace
slows it down correspondingly. Note that most people will want to have their
end-of-line notification dings turned off in the WE Braille menu; also, if
quick messages are enabled, they need to be dismissed with a routing button
(this includes the announcements of scroll-time changes spoken by the script,
too). This works very "jerkily" in Word (for reasons I'll
comment on at the end of this message), but works great in reading web pages,
e-mail messages, and in wordpad where I've used it to read a book from
Bookshare. Here's the script: (hopefully the mail client won't introduce
spurious line-breaks).
' Begin Braille Auto-Scroll Script
' Alpha version written by Robert Englebretson
' Please feel free to modify, improve, and redistribute
'
' Scrolls the braille display at a regular time interval
' Initiated by Control-Shift-q
' Terminated by pressing the escape key
' Defaults to a rate of scrolling once every 2.2 seconds (good for a 40-cell
display)
' Spacebar speeds up the scrolling by increments of one-tenth of a second
' Backspace slows down the scrolling by increments of one-tenth of a second
' New scroll-rate is maintained for the rest of the WE session or until script
is reloaded
' Other keypresses allowed through as normal (b/c arrows, navigation keys, and
browse-mode keys are still useful)
'
' define variables
Dim BrailleAutoScrollHotkey
Dim OnStopKey
Dim ScrollDelay
'
' Setup control-shift-q to start scrolling
Set BrailleAutoScrollHotkey = Keyboard.RegisterHotkey("Control-Shift-q",
"BrailleAutoScroll")
'
' Sets default scroll delay value in MS (adequate for a 40-cell display)
ScrollDelay = 2200
'
' Define the autoscroll subroutine
Sub BrailleAutoScroll()
' Clears the escape-key press from previous session
OnStopKey = False
' Connects to the keyboard keypress and key-release events
Press = ConnectEvent(Keyboard, "OnKeyDown", "Keypress")
Rel = ConnectEvent(Keyboard, "OnKeyUp", "KeyRel")
' Set up the auto-scroll loop
Do while OnStopKey = false
Sleep ScrollDelay
ExecuteBrailleHotkey bhkScrollBrailleRight
Loop
' Disconnects all events after loop is terminated with esc
Disconnect Press
Disconnect Rel
Speak "AutoScroll Stopped."
End Sub
'
' Set up function for disposition of KeyDown events during scrolling
Function KeyPress(VKCode, Modifiers)
' Terminates the autoscroll loop if esc-key is pressed
If VKCode = 27 then
OnStopKey = true
Keypress = KDDiscard
Exit function
End if
' Increases scroll speed by 0.1 seconds if spacebar is pressed
If VKCode = 32 then
ScrollDelay = ScrollDelay-100
Keypress = KDDiscard
Speak ScrollDelay/1000 & " seconds."
Exit function
End if
' Decreases scroll speed by 0.1 seconds if backspace key is pressed
If VKCode = 8 then
ScrollDelay = ScrollDelay+100
Keypress = KDDiscard
Speak ScrollDelay/1000 & " seconds."
Exit function
End if
End function
'
' Disposition of corresponding KeyUp events
Function KeyRel(VKCode, Modifiers)
If VKCode = 27 then
KeyRel = KDDiscard
Exit function
End if
If VKCode = 32 then
KeyRel = KDDiscard
Exit function
End if
If VKCode = 8 then
KeyRel = KDDiscard
Exit function
End if
End function
'
' End Braille Auto-Scroll Script
Here are a few comments and suggestions for anyone who might want to work on
this further:
(1) This doesn't work well in Microsoft Word 2007, at all. But then again I
don't find that Window-Eyes braille works well in Word either. The problem is
at the ends of lines,there is a significant lag-time between when the advance
button is pressed and when the display actually scrolls. I don't know why
this is,or if it's unique to my system--I'd appreciate feedback from other
users on this. In any case, as a result of the lag in Word when reaching
line-endings, the autoscroll script doesn't scroll at a regular interval at
those points. It acts a bit like an arrhythmic heartbeat...
(2) If I were to develop this script further, it would be nice if the routing
buttons on the display would stop the script, *and* route the cursor to the
correct cell.
(3) The script should be made to stop once the cursor stops moving (i.e. when
the end of a file is reached.) Now it just sits and dings until we press
escape.
(4) It would be nice to be able to define items in the Braille Hotkey menu to
do all of the script functions, instead of having to be tied to the keyboard.
(5) When the autoscroll is fast (for example with my SyncBraille 20 I set the
sleep time to 1.1 seconds), the announcements of time-change are not spoken
(e.g. when space or backspace is pressed for the script). I suspect the
problem is that these are being interrupted by some sort of program event--and
so it works well when scrolling is slower than about 2 seconds, but not when it
is faster. I haven't been able to determine what is interrupting speech, or
how to force the message to speak regardless.
(6) Now this is a real pie-in-the-sky wish--but it would be really nice if
there were a way to determine exactly how much text is being sent to the
display on each chunk, and for the scrolltime to automatically adjust itself
accordingly. What I mean is: this script works great when the whole display
is full. 2.2 seconds is exactly the right amount of time (for me) to thoroughly
read 40 cells. But if only,say, 10 cells of the display have text on them, then
I have to wait almost 1.5 seconds for the display to scroll itself--or I have
to hit the advance button manually. It would be nice, for example, if the
script could determine that only 10 cells are showing, and thus scroll that
particular display-full after only one-fourth the usual time delay.
(7) This probably should be set not to work if there's no braille display
connected.
Well,have fun! I find this quite useful, and I suspect others will too--but I
don't have the time or expertise to turn this into something I would feel good
about packaging and making publicly available. I'd definitely be interested in
receiving any updated/improved versions that any of you come up with though.
Best,
--Robert Englebretson
******************************************************************
Dr. Robert Englebretson
Dept. of Linguistics, MS23
Rice University
6100 Main St.
Houston, TX 77005-1892
Phone: 713 348-4776
E-mail: [email protected]
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~reng
