Accessibility: caret tracking in emacs with gnome shell magnifier

Accessibility: caret tracking in emacs with gnome shell magnifier

[Eric Danan]

Hello,

Due to a visual impairment I constantly work with a screen magnifier 
turned on (in full screen mode), and I need it to track the caret to 
follow what I am typing.

So far I am using emacs 26.1 on cygwin on windows 10, and the windows 10 
magnifier does the job of tracking the caret.

I am considering switching to gnome on linux and therefore installed the 
fedora (version 29) distribution to try it out. The gnome (3.30) shell 
magnifier supports caret tracking and it works in other applications but 
not emacs (26.1).

I previously sent this message to the gnome accessibility list (that was 
a long time ago in 2015, so with earlier versions of emacs and gnome) 
and got a reply from Alex Arnaud (cc) stating:

 > I've tried to test Emacs with Accercicer (a accessibility debug tool) 
and my conclusion are Emacs doesn't connect it to AT-SPI (accessibility 
stack).

He also suggested that I write to this list, which I'm (finally!) doing. 
I hope it is appropriate to report this here.

Best regards,

Eric

Re: Accessibility: caret tracking in emacs with gnome shell magnifier

[Alex ARNAUD]

Hello Eric,

I'm myself a visual-impaired and an emacs users.

I advise you to run emacs inside the GNOME Terminal. The steps are:
1) Open GNOME Terminal
2) Write the command "emacs -nw"

I personally use Debian GNU/Linux, Mate and Compiz Reloaded focus 
tracking feature because I found them more reliable for those reasons:
- There is an accessibility team inside Debian
- Mate team take care of accessibility and offer a more natural desktop 
experience
- I'm participating to the screen magnifier and focus tracking of Compiz 
reloaded so I couldn't be fully objective but I hope our focus tracking 
feature is more reliable than the GNOME One, if not, don't hesitate to 
fill a bug.

Best regards,
Alex.

Le 25/02/2019 à 10:34, Eric Danan a écrit :
> Hello,
> 
> Due to a visual impairment I constantly work with a screen magnifier 
> turned on (in full screen mode), and I need it to track the caret to 
> follow what I am typing.
> 
> So far I am using emacs 26.1 on cygwin on windows 10, and the windows 10 
> magnifier does the job of tracking the caret.
> 
> I am considering switching to gnome on linux and therefore installed the 
> fedora (version 29) distribution to try it out. The gnome (3.30) shell 
> magnifier supports caret tracking and it works in other applications but 
> not emacs (26.1).
> 
> I previously sent this message to the gnome accessibility list (that was 
> a long time ago in 2015, so with earlier versions of emacs and gnome) 
> and got a reply from Alex Arnaud (cc) stating:
> 
>  > I've tried to test Emacs with Accercicer (a accessibility debug tool) 
> and my conclusion are Emacs doesn't connect it to AT-SPI (accessibility 
> stack).
> 
> He also suggested that I write to this list, which I'm (finally!) doing. 
> I hope it is appropriate to report this here.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Eric

Re: Accessibility: caret tracking in emacs with gnome shell magnifier

[Eric Danan]

Thank you Alex. I'd like to use GUI emacs so as to be able to e.g. use 
the pdf-tools package to view pdf files (this is not possible in 
terminal as far as I know). If I installed debian with the mate desktop, 
would caret tracking work in GUI emacs?

Thanks,

Eric

On 2019-02-25 11:06, Alex ARNAUD wrote:
> Hello Eric,
>
> I'm myself a visual-impaired and an emacs users.
>
> I advise you to run emacs inside the GNOME Terminal. The steps are:
> 1) Open GNOME Terminal
> 2) Write the command "emacs -nw"
>
> I personally use Debian GNU/Linux, Mate and Compiz Reloaded focus 
> tracking feature because I found them more reliable for those reasons:
> - There is an accessibility team inside Debian
> - Mate team take care of accessibility and offer a more natural 
> desktop experience
> - I'm participating to the screen magnifier and focus tracking of 
> Compiz reloaded so I couldn't be fully objective but I hope our focus 
> tracking feature is more reliable than the GNOME One, if not, don't 
> hesitate to fill a bug.
>
> Best regards,
> Alex.
>
> Le 25/02/2019 à 10:34, Eric Danan a écrit :
>> Hello,
>>
>> Due to a visual impairment I constantly work with a screen magnifier 
>> turned on (in full screen mode), and I need it to track the caret to 
>> follow what I am typing.
>>
>> So far I am using emacs 26.1 on cygwin on windows 10, and the windows 
>> 10 magnifier does the job of tracking the caret.
>>
>> I am considering switching to gnome on linux and therefore installed 
>> the fedora (version 29) distribution to try it out. The gnome (3.30) 
>> shell magnifier supports caret tracking and it works in other 
>> applications but not emacs (26.1).
>>
>> I previously sent this message to the gnome accessibility list (that 
>> was a long time ago in 2015, so with earlier versions of emacs and 
>> gnome) and got a reply from Alex Arnaud (cc) stating:
>>
>>  > I've tried to test Emacs with Accercicer (a accessibility debug 
>> tool) and my conclusion are Emacs doesn't connect it to AT-SPI 
>> (accessibility stack).
>>
>> He also suggested that I write to this list, which I'm (finally!) 
>> doing. I hope it is appropriate to report this here.
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Eric

Re: Accessibility: caret tracking in emacs with gnome shell magnifier

[Alex ARNAUD]

Le 25/02/2019 à 14:13, Eric Danan a écrit :
> Thank you Alex. I'd like to use GUI emacs so as to be able to e.g. use 
> the pdf-tools package to view pdf files (this is not possible in 
> terminal as far as I know).

I never tried to read PDF inside Emacs because I use it only as text editor.

> If I installed debian with the mate desktop, 
> would caret tracking work in GUI emacs?

No, it won't work. I can't tell you why and if it's a complicated stuff 
to make it working.

Best regards,
Alex.

Re: Accessibility: caret tracking in emacs with gnome shell magnifier

[Stefan Monnier]

> I am considering switching to gnome on linux and therefore installed the
> fedora (version 29) distribution to try it out.  The gnome (3.30) shell
> magnifier supports caret tracking and it works in other applications but not
> Emacs (26.1).

[ Not sure what you mean by the "caret", but I'll assume it's more or
  less the same as what I call the "cursor".  ]

Sounds like an important missing feature.  

I don't see a bug about it yet at debbugs.gnu.org, so please open one
via `M-x report-emacs-bug`.


        Stefan