On 23/07/2011 2:43 AM, Pete Brunet wrote: > Why doesn't NVDA just always use accName for normal browsing instead of > IAText::text? If that were the case then there would be no need to know > when accName is different than IAText::text. In NVDA browse mode (also known as virtual cursor, virtual buffer, etc. in other screen readers), the text is presented to the user in a flat representation to make it readable as if the user were working with, say, a word processor. Thus, we want to keep the content as close as possible to the original content. Some reasons we don't always use accName to retrieve this content (and this is by no means an exhaustive list): 1. accName might contain content from descendant objects; e.g. a table row, a link containing a graphic, etc. If we just use accName, we must choose to either ignore information from all descendant objects (thus losing semantic information) or render content from those descendant objects and try to filter out duplicates (very ugly and complicated). 2. In the case of editable text fields and some other form controls, the name is not what we want. Instead, we want the value or text. (If the label is visible on screen, we do render it, but that's because we take the content from the label object.) 3. accName contains no text attributes, so all information about formatting would be lost. (NVDA doesn't currently report this information for Firefox, but we plan to rectify this soon.) Of course, we still want to honour overrides like aria-label, etc., hence the request under discussion.
Btw, I'm confused by your use of the term explicit name. I would have thought explicit name was the name the author "explicitly" requested (i.e. the override) rather than the original, non-overridden name. This is why I used terms like "override" and "from content" in my original proposal. We probably need to straighten out this terminology. Perhaps I'm the only one who is confused by this? :) Jamie -- James Teh Vice President, Developer NV Access Inc, ABN 61773362390 Email: [email protected] Web site: http://www.nvaccess.org/ _______________________________________________ Accessibility-ia2 mailing list [email protected] https://lists.linux-foundation.org/mailman/listinfo/accessibility-ia2
