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Re: [Nano-devel] [nano] improving accessibility


From: Benno Schulenberg
Subject: Re: [Nano-devel] [nano] improving accessibility
Date: Fri, 09 Sep 2016 09:41:17 +0200

[CC'ing the list, with Enrico's permission.]

On Wed, Sep 7, 2016, at 22:19, Enrico Mioso wrote:
> Hi!
> First of all, thank you for your work and maintenance of the nano editor.
> And thank you to all of the people who made this program great. I started
> using it some time ago, and actually never left it.
> 
> I am a blind Linux user: so I use a braille display to use nano.
> I am asking here to you if it could be possible to "improve" the editor
> accessibility a little bit, by disabling cursor hiding on some parts of
> the program (e.g.: file browser).
> In file browser.c, line 61, I can see this:
> curs_set(0);
> ... could it be possible to make this configurable or in some way avoid this 
> ncurses call? Anytime the cursor is hidden, may be a problematic point to 
> handle in terms of accessibility. There is still the possibility to track 
> down 
> what's chaning using color attribute changes, but it could be unconfortable, 
> at 
> least to me.
> 
> Then, another thing I remember being difficult to use was the spell checking 
> functionality: because the wrong word is hilighted at some point. I don't 
> think 
> nano can do something about this, because it seemd completely handed by 
> aspell 
> or similar, but I ask to you here just to get an idea of what you think.
> 
> Thank you very very much again for your work and everything,
> Enrico

Hello Enrico,

Improving the accessibility of nano...  I would first have to
understand the way in which you use nano -- what it is you can
"see" on your braille display (one line of text, a few lines?)
and how you can control what is displayed, whether you can
"scroll" the display over the screen.  Maybe you have a URL
that explains these things?

I don't think it would be useful to leave the cursor on in the
places where nano currently switches it off.  In the file browser,
for example, it would just sit at the end of the list, while the
"real cursor" (the highlight marking a file name) sits elsewhere
on the screen.  Or would you like the cursor to be where this
highlight is?

About spell checking...  If you use the default spell checker
(that is: you have configured nothing in your ~/.nanorc), then
it should not be necessary to see what is highlighted because
the same word is given on the statusbar, ready to be edited.
If you have configured aspell as your spell checker, there is
nothing nano can you do about its complicated correction screen.

Regards,

Benno

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