Add custom Braille landmarks

[vincent-lg]

I propose that, instead of using dot 78 to mark a formatting change, Braille delimiters be used to clearly identify different formats.

Justification

Adding dot 7 and 8 to inform about a specific formatting offers several drawbacks:

• It drowns out these dots, and important information can sometimes be found on dots 7 and 8. In most computer Braille tables, dot 7 is used to indicate capital letters. While this information is not vital, not seeing it can be problematic and force the user to turn off Attributa just to examine a word.
• It doesn't allow to differentiate between different formats.

As it is, the user relying only on Braille (as I do) would turn on only one of the options of Attributa to avoid clustering and hard-to-decode information. For instance, I like to see my spelling errors with dot 7 and 8, but if I turn anything else on, I won't know what's what.

Proposal

Instead of using dot 7 and 8 to indicate these formatting changes, I propose to use clear Braille landmarks that, maybe, the user can choose. There would be one Braille landmark before the affected portion, and another one at the end. For instance:

This is in <b>bold<B>.

I know this will add quite a layer of complexity, since it will shift Braille cells further and render NVDA's calculation for the routing cursor invalid, but I believe this is worth it.

I have detailed this proposal on a NVDA issue but have been asked to talk to you about the problem first.

[aaclause]

Hello, Thank you for this great suggestion. I also have this idea since a while. I hope to implement it soon!

[zstanecic]

hi are you planning it for next ver?

[aaclause]

Yes, I'll try to implement this for the next version. I'd like to release a stable version for early August.

[aaclause]

Hi, I'd like to integrate this feature for January. @vincent-lg, @zstanecic: if a piece of text is in bold and underline for example, should we combine the landmarks like this? ⣇⠃⠥⣸blah-blahh-blah⣇⡃⡥⣸ Also, if we press a routing cursor button above '⣇⠃⠥⣸' or '⣇⡃⡥⣸', what behavior would you like?

[bdorer]

In my case, I'd like the Cursor jumps to the nearest char it the landmark belongs to. What do others think?

[vincent-lg]

Hi, Sorry answering took so long. I do agree with @bdorer. It would make sense if clicking on the landmark jumped to the first character in the landmark. NVDA behaves like this for other things, I believe, like HTML landmarks (ln, edit and so on). Hope that helps, Vincent

[aaclause]

@vincent-lg, @bdorer Thank you for your feedback. I agree with you. I plan to resume development soon (this summer).