Re: Dragging and dropping with orca

On 29 May 2007 at 22:39, Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:

> How will this differ from cutting (Ctrl+X) and pasting
(Ctrl+V)
> though? What could you do with drag and drop that you
cannot do with
> cut and paste?

There are situations, such as in certain audio editing and
music software wher you are to 
manipulate widgets and such and in that case, you can't
copy/paste. Normally, sliders are 
acted upon without one having to do things such as
drag/drop, but in certain cases, at least in 
the other os when the screen reader can't recognize the
widget as other than a graphic, but 
you for a fact know it is a knob or slider, you simply have
to drag/drop to act upon this widget. 
You may also be required to drag to scrub in a wave form to
find audio that you want to edit. I 
don't know if there are programs like Acid Pro in Linux, but
there if you want to put an audio 
loop on a track you have to drag it there. No copying
available. These programs may not be 
accessible today, but let's for a moment play with the
thought that they revealed all their 
contents through At-Spi, only there were no keyboard
commands for manipulating sound, 
widgets etc. It would be very handy to be able to drag/drop,
not only with the standard mouse 
keys but with shift, alt and ctrl and the same goes for
clicking.

In other cases such as in fax programs or others, you *must*
drag a recipient from one list to 
another and there's simply no copy/paste option available. I
don't know how common this is 
in Linux, but i've seen it elsewhere and it's from that
experience i talk.
-- 
/Krister
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kristerkristersplace.ws wrote:
> On 29 May 2007 at 22:39, Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
>> How will this differ from cutting (Ctrl+X) and
pasting (Ctrl+V)
>> though? What could you do with drag and drop that
you cannot do with
>> cut and paste?
> There are situations, such as in certain audio editing
and music
> software wher you are to manipulate widgets and such
and in that
> case, you can't copy/
> paste.
Exactly, and not just audio apps iether. Think of diagram
editing or 
anything remotely graphical that's based on direct
manipulation. Any 
cursorless area in which the user has to use the mouse to
select stuff 
presents similar problems. many readers implement D&D,
that's drag and drop 
not dungeons and dragons <ssmile>, as marking the
source object for dragging 
and the destination object for dropping. But another equally
useful thing 
would be the ability to drag with the left or right button
an arbitrary 
vertical, horizontal or circular amount measured in pixels.
This kind of 
dragging is used to manipulate controls like knobs, which is
not about 
dragging one object to another.

Yet another thing, in which at least the MAc requires drag
and drop, is 
lists in which you have to re-arrange items by preference
e.g. preferred 
languages on the Web. In addition to screen reader based
D&D, I've seen 
up/down buttons and keyboard interfaces for moving e.g.
alt+arrows.

And howabout re-arranging and re-sizing columns in what
people call tables, 
multi-column list views or deetails views depending on
context? Windows does 
not provide a keyboard interface for any of this in the
control directly, 
and if the Linux folks have been borrowing without thinking,
I suppose 
neither does Gnome. I honestly think MS made a mistake with
that particular 
control and having to suffer from it ten years in various
apps, it is 
extremely annoying to see the same poor keyboard interface
being duplicated, 
say in OS X. Sory, I just feel strongly about this, and
wanted to get the 
point across (ho offense ment, <smile>). I honestly
hope Gnome and all the 
rest of the Linux GUis do better keybordwise. So, the
question, can you 
re-arrange columns in a multi-column list from the keyboard
in Gnome? In 
WIndows, screne reader based D&D or duplicating the
functionality in a 
dialog box (think OE or Explorer's choose columns) are some
of the 
work-arounds.

Back to mousy things, though, the fundamental problem is at
the app end, 
though, failing to provide a keyboard interface for custom
controls like 
knobs, sliders, points in graphs etc...  I see no reason why
knobs could not 
have the same keyboard interface as sliders do: up/right for
small 
increment, pg up/down for larger units and home/end for 
reaching min and 
max. Its just that once things get custom enough, people
stop payihng 
attention to keyboard interfaces, which is sad. And its
quite common that 
you even cannot type in or see values directly, because the
original thing 
they are emulating or modelling could not do that either,
which annoys the 
heck out of me. It happens an awful lot in the synth plug
world for no real 
reason.

How is the Linux music software in this regard? Most Vst
plugs and hosts are 
keyboard nightmares to say the least, and I'm afraid this
mousy philosophy 
might have carried over to LInux as wel. How is ardour, for
example, which 
should be GTK+ 2 based and thus potentially accessible? a
friend of mine has 
been hyping that one a lot lately. He also runs VST plugs
under WIne but no 
ORca there, of course.

> want to put an audio loop on a track you have to drag
it there.
Not only that but you have to drag, too, when you want to
extend a pattern. 
from a keyboard user point of view, this makes no sense at
all. I mean, if I 
know I want 10 times pattern x, 12 times pattern y and 10
times pattern z, 
that's a lot of D&D which can be very slow full-sscreen
magnified. It would 
be an order of magnitude faster for me to simply supply a
repeat count.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatilamail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.stude
nt.oulu.fi/~vtatila/ 

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