Verbosity levels

[nvaccessAuto]

Reported by jteh on 2008-03-18 21:22 Many users have requested different verbosity levels in NVDA. There are many aspects to consider for this functionality.

• There are already verbosity settings to control various announcements; e.g. punctuation, object presentation settings, document formatting settings and virtual buffer settings.
• I do not think these settings should be forceably changed when a particular verbosity level is selected.
  • Otherwise, there is no way for the user to change the verbosity level without affecting other settings.
• Despite this objection, some users want default configuration for a given level of verbosity.
  • Perhaps this should be separate somehow? i.e. There would be an option to configure default settings for a given verbosity level which the user could choose if desired. Blocking #3018

[nvaccessAuto]

Attachment verbosity.patch added by jteh on 2008-03-18 21:25 Description: Aleksey's original patch Update: File added from Trac verbosity.patch.txt

[nvaccessAuto]

Comment 1 by alekseys on 2008-03-26 13:30 following is my thoughts: for nvda scripts to be more friendly and not to clutter up code by a lot of checks, we can create module e.g. messages.py in which we can store all verbosity-dependents messages in some dictionary and function msg(str) which will return verbosity-specific msg (as () returns language specific msg). we can have nvda settings dialog named "Verbosity" with list of verbosity levels and checkbox to force default verbosity configuration. if you agree with this way i can start to implement it becouse i myself need such feature :-)

[nvaccessAuto]

Comment 2 by aleksey_s on 2008-07-30 09:48 i want to know what developers thing on it. i hope i can implement it myself.

[nvaccessAuto]

Comment 3 by pvagner on 2008-08-01 06:39 Guys here are my thoughts: 1) I think settings in the object presentation, virtual buffers and other formatting settings should not affect verbosity levels. I can remember there was a discussion somewhere that we might introduce application specific settings or even ability to store all the settings into profiles. This is the right way on how to manage the groups of settings I believe. 2) If verbosity has to affect NVDA's speech otput then I do like Aleksey's proposal. There should be dictionary of actions and verbosity levels and NVDA should be able to request an appropriate message based off of the desired verbosity level when it has something to speak E.G. result of a script etc. Although this does not sound very profesional but another fact to consider is we might assign some more variables to scripts besides docstring in order to be able to bind the messages to it.

[nvaccessAuto]

Comment 4 by tvalusek on 2008-08-01 08:11 Let's try looking at this from different point of view:

I can still use sight, so I currently have no screen reader loaded, since I don't need its chatter. But what I'd like to have is all its powers and abilities, accessed "on demand". So there should be an option to tell NVDA "Don't say anything until asked", and verbosity settings should be combined with synthesizer/voice setting in a facility called "profile" - but that's for another ticket ...

[nvaccessAuto]

Comment 5 by pvagner on 2008-08-01 09:38 Hello, ability to speak on demand is already possible. You can use NVDA+s to switch speech mode to off and return it back when needed. Or are you seeking for something different? This is all fine the thing I am trying to accomplish with these postings is to define what is verbosity level's business and what can be put aside for the configuration profiles or possibly application specific settings.

[nvaccessAuto]

Comment 6 by Bernd on 2008-12-07 09:59 Hello guys, I would like such a feature. So I ask you Is there still work on this ticket?

[nvaccessAuto]

Comment 7 by aleksey_s (in reply to comment 6) on 2008-12-07 10:28 Replying to Bernd: as core developers didn't reply yet, i don't work on it right now.

[nvaccessAuto]

Comment 8 by clev on 2010-01-28 00:41 Supose that I'm selecting the word "text" with shift + right arrow, letter by letter. Currently, NVDA says "selecting" plus the letter I selected. One cannot by as productive as if it was possible to turn of the word "selecting", so that NVDA would say just the letters. Thus, this is a needed verbosity option, so that one doesn't need to manually modify speech.py and solve conflicts when updating the sources.

[nvaccessAuto]

Comment by jteh on 2013-02-24 01:06 (In #3018) This is a help message. While I understand the desire for it for newer users, NVDA doesn't currently support help messages at all, so this would need to be implemented first.

[nvaccessAuto]

Comment 11 by zahari_bgr on 2014-03-18 04:06 I totaly agree with this ticket. Almost any new user is bodered with some messages, someone needs less verbosity, another one - more, many users are not happy with the order of text and control names, etc. I feel it should be handled in more generalized way, like a dictionary with all messages for all verbosity levels, and the ability for the user to change any of this, including playing beeps instead of the control names, revert to defaults for current message/verbosity level/all, etc. I'm realizing this won't be easy, but will shut all this conversations up and will make both the developers and users happy.

[LeonarddeR]

I've received several messages from users in the last months that there is still desire for some sort of verbosity level system, particularly to separate braille verbosity from speech verbosity.

Related issues: #214 and #7232

[Adriani90]

I think separating speech verbosity and braille display levels makes a lot of sense. But adding different speech levels requires deep understanding of different user groups. I think we need a good survey among all NVDA users so that we can make a difference between the prefered verbosity for beginners, for regular users, for advanced users and for experts. Otherwise, after implementing such a feature, lots of users will come and say, this announcement should not be included in level x and so on.

I am happy to create such a survey. But I will need some engaged people to help me in promoting it and writing a final report of the results because my time will be quite limited in the next couple of months.

[Adriani90]

@leonardder, @jcsteh, @michaelDCurran any updates on this? Is such a survey something that would help you in developping this feature? For me personally, I would say it is enough to adjust document formating settings with some more entries according to survey results. Verbosity levels are very subjective and in my opinion this will not be easy for beginners to adapt to. But I don't know what is the consensus among you developers.

[Adriani90]

After thinking about this more, and testing the approach in Narator, I think it might be worth it to begin investigate following at least for the object presentation settings:

• NVDA could provide verbosity levels in dialogs which have different groupings for group of elements, such as options dialogs in Windows or MS office, Ribbon menus in MS Office etc.
• 3verbosity levels could be implemented
  1. Direct context (NVDA reports only the focused element label, control type and value / state / option selected + position of item(i.e. 1 of 7)
  2. Detailed context (NVDA reports direct context + object help tooltips + keyboard shortcut, if exposed
  3. Full context (NVDA reports detailed context on each object + it reports the label of every grouping when entering new group of objects in a dialog / ribbon menu etc.

The benefits would be that an user does hav less settings to perform in order to reach its desired verbosity level.

Alternatively, a list of checkboxes could be added and all the settings for each part of reporting in dialogs and ribbons menus etc. chould be checked or unchecked. Depending on the amount of settings you check or uncheck, you reach a different level of verbosity. In that case an user would have the unlimited power over settings.