A main interface accessibility suggestion

[jpgreer]

I discovered this one by pure accident. I noticed that when I minimized Text Aloud 2.28 to the system tray and restored it to the main screen that I was able to TAB through some of the options on the interface. But, if I tabbed any further than the Speak button that it would trap the pointer focus and not allow the focus to move anywhere else.. It might be helpful for new blind Text Aloud users if they were able to TAB through the interface options and buttons and once it reaches the last button or option onthe interface it would cycle back to the first option. It is not really a necessary thing that this be implimented but it would make much more convenient in some instances. One other thing that I had posted in a previous post is the keyboard shortcut screen. You may consider disabling the ability to use the TAB key as a keyboard shortcut. The reason for this is because when the keyboard shortcut screen comes up and you press enter on the Edit button to bring the shortcut input screen the input box make the TAB key a keyboard shortcut and there is no way to tab to the OK or Cancel or the Clear buttons because the focus gets trapped in the text box. From my knowlege most all screen readers in cluding Jaws and Window Eyes use the TAB key as a way to move through interface. buttons Please excuse my bad typing skills

[kdwhite]

We've struggled with this one a little bit. The main problem is once you TAB into the text area, TAB is a perfectly valid character to be used when typing text. We can't prevent users from TABBing into the text area, because how else would a blind user get there to type in a new article. But at the same time, we can't just force a TAB while in the text area to move the user back out of that area, because TAB is something users sometimes want to use when typing text. So for the moment at least, what we've settled on is Shift-TAB. Shift-TAB will normally move you backwards in TAB order (whereas TAB takes you to the next field/button, Shift-TAB takes you to the previous one). When in the text area, you can get out with Shift-TAB, which takes you back to the top of the TAB order in this screen.

[jpgreer]

Shift Tab doesn't work once it gets in to the text area in the main interface, it traps the mouse focus and doesn't let it go back.. In the keyboard shorcut input area because it registers the TAB key as a keyboard shortcut entry it traps the mouse pointer focus in the text input area and doesn't let you tab to the confirmation buttons.

[kdwhite]

I'm not getting that result at all. Any chance you've defined a shortcut for Shift-TAB, or a hotkey?

Anyone else seeing this?

[jpgreer]

I haven't set any keyboard shortcuts that I am aware of because the keyboard shortcut input box "The part where you press the keys you want assign" is not possible to navigate because it registers the TAB key as a key press for input and it traps the focus. Because of this I am unabble to move the focus to the OK, Cancel or Clear button. I do have a couple of hotkeys set up. One of them is CTRL+Z to stop it from reading and CTRL+ F12 to pause and resume reading from clipboard. A possible solution to the Shortcut Setup problem is that when a person clicks the Edit button to select a Shortcut you could have two combo boxes. One for the VTRL, ALT, TAB etc. and the other for the 1,2,3,A,B,C etc.. Sorry I am such a pain. I would like to stop here and say that you guys are doing a great job and I hope that you are not frustrated with me.

[kdwhite]

Not frustrated at all and we really appreciate the help. Let me check on some things here.