Description Grant Taylor 2011-02-18 09:37:42 EST

Build Identifier: Eclipse 3.4, perhaps others

Here is a slightly modified version of an email from a blind team member trying to use our product:

I have just joined the <product inheriting from Eclipse> team. Being totally blind I use a screen reader to access a PC; currently I use Jaws 11 (I've used Jaws more or less from its inception). I would like to explain some difficulties I am currently having using the <product inheriting from Eclipse> with Jaws.

Those Jaws users who are unfamiliar with the Eclipse environment would normally expect f6 or control + tab to move them from one view to another (from the navigator to the editor to the outline view  to the problem area), but f6 does nothing and control tab only moves you around in a view, not between views. Because somebody directed me to the list of keyboard shortcuts in the Help section I spotted control f7 to get from view to view, though I was unaware of having to hold down the control key; in fact in my attempts to experiment I had tried control and shift with f6 and f7 to see if that moved me from view to view but because I didn't hold down the key it sounded as if a dialogue box came up and disappeared.

With help from a team mate I found a way, as much by luck as anything else, of bringing nodes on to a canvas and making connections between them in our GEF-based editor. It is counterintuitive though, because the list of nodes appears to live in a pallet which operates via drag and drop which had caused me to think that initially it simply couldn't be done. However we have found difficulties which don't have an obvious solution. 

There are general problems with feedback. One example is that on the pallet where the tree views of nodes are, all you hear is 'tab' when you initially land on it, so you've no way of knowing what the significance of where you are is. Jaws also doesn't tell you if a connection has been made between two nodes  or not; so for example I thought I had established a connection between two nodes, but a team mate had to point out to me that a "wire" dangling from the source node signified that a connection still had to be made.

The other thing I find is that some keyboard  actions produce unpredictable results, such as sometimes right arrows move from one item to the other and sometimes down arrow, but with no obvious rhyme and reason as to which.

I am investigating the possibility of writing my own Jaws script to try and make things more efficient and easy. I've looked through the Jaws help topics for assistance but it's limited. Is there a document containing advice on using Jaws which I should know about? Is there  another blind <product inheriting from Eclipse> team member I could talk to?

I hope this doesn't come across as too critical, but a key concern of mine is that I don't take up too much of my colleagues' time asking for help because of accessibility difficulties. Are there plans to make <product inheriting from Eclipse> more usable with screen readers?


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Please let me know if you'd like some of the above issue separated into different defect.  Perhaps one for GEF and one for the workbench?