Gene, I'm sorry I missed your question. I tried deducing the level of comment by its contents, but I found it was too hard. Some posts have several hundreds of comments. Every top level comment might have a tree of a few dozen replies. And depending on the topic of the post, sometimes it is not clear at all whether the comment is a top level one or a reply. Also my brain gets tired of trying to deduce the level of the comment. Now since I get the offset of a comment directly, it is going to be much easier for my brain, since I would need to listen and only compare the number (offset being equal to the top-level comment offset).

Tony

I ask a question in this message and make a few comments but the second half of the message discusses what might be a related command, at least in terms of how you would program it.  Perhaps if there is enough interest on the list, the developers will work on it soon. 

 

The review cursor by default if you are using object navigation follows the system cursor.  But what I'm saying is if you only want to read the top level comments, then don't you have to move to every comment and measure the distance?  My question is how that is better than reading a few words of each comment to see if you want to continue.  But maybe you have to read enough of each comment that it is slower enough to matter. 

 

Evidently, the speak position command has more functions than in the old version of NVDA I use.  So you are correct that to hear the numbers, you have to issue the command twice.

Also, the idea of being able to jump to the next occurrence of text starting a certain point from the left of the screen might be related to another feature NVDA should have.  If you have a page with two or three columns or more and you want to only read one column, you should be able to define a start point and an end point farther to the right.  Then you could read and only have that defineed column read.  ASAP had a read column feature in JAWS.  I seldo had to use it but I would imagine it was very useful to some people,  Consider one use with NVDA:

Suppose you got a poorly formatted PDF document where pages didn't decolumnize properly.  Rather than have decolumnization occur, if you could just have the page recognized with no decolumnization and set the columns yourself, you might be able to read such documents. 

 

Genea distance from the left of the screen
----- Original Message -----

From: Tony Malykh

Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2017 6:22 PM

To: nvda@nvda.groups.io

Subject: Re: [nvda] Browsing hierarchical tree of comments

I am an NVDA newbie, so I don't know how or why this works, but it works for me. I tried it on both Reddit and Hacker News in Google Chrome and Firefox. I don't have to press any extra buttons to route the review cursor, perhaps the review cursor just follows the system cursor in my case.

After your email I tried pressing Insert+Delete only once, and it indeed speaks the horizontal offset of current object in (I assume) pixels. After pressing it twice it speaks the horizontal offset in percentage of the screen width. So either way can be used.

I like your idea about NVDA addon that would let you jump between paragraphs with the same offset. I might try to write such a plugin myself when I have some free time.

Tony

On 12/6/2017 3:33 PM, Gene wrote:

I haven't tried this but I don't see how using the cursor location feature would help much.  You would still have to move to the beginning of each comment and check the distance.  If that would save you time in not having to read any of the comment, I don't know but having to move to the next comment and check the distance of each comment would seem to be cumbersome and perhaps not much easier than reading a bit of each comment to see if it’s a reply.  but those who try this may explain that I'm wrong and why. 

 

Perhaps what we need, if this can be done, is a feature or a plugin you can set to look for text that starts a certain distance from the left side of the screen and then be able to jump to the next text that starts at the same number of pixels from the left of the screen.  You could issue a next and a back command to move to these items.  So the idea may lead to a good solution if such a feature can be developed.

 

By the way, you don't have to issue the command twice.  It does the same thing if issued once or more times.

 

Gene

----- Original Message -----

From: Tony Malykh

Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2017 4:20 PM

To: nvda@nvda.groups.io

Subject: Re: [nvda] Browsing hierarchical tree of comments

I've been playing with NVDA and just discovered a simple solution: press
Insert + Numpad Delete twice (Report review cursor location) and it will
tell you the distance from the left edge of the screen. The greater the
distance - the deeper the level of the comment.


I think in theory something can be done on the client side to make the
comments more readable for screenreader users.. You can write a browser
plugin that would modify a page to include the level of the comment
explicitly for example. But this is only in theory: my knowledge of
javascript/HTML/CSS is too poor to write it myself.


Tony





On 12/6/2017 11:29 AM, Bill Dengler wrote:
> I’m interested in this as well, but suspect it requires changes on the site’s end.
>
> Bill
>
>> On Dec 6, 2017, at 7:00 PM, Tony Malykh <anton.malykh@...> wrote:
>>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> Many websites have tree-like structure of comments. For
>> example, reddit, hacker news, and probably a lot more websites are
>> like this. Sometimes I would like to read some comments, but for
>> example I would like to read only the top-level comments, and not the
>> deeper levels, because that would be the replies to the top-level
>> comments, and they are typically not as interesting. Is there any way
>> to achieve this with NVDA?
>>
>> So, for example, I would like to have a key combination to jump to the
>> next same level comment. Right now I can only jump to the next comment
>> of any level by searching a keyword ("up vote" or something, that
>> appears next to every comment), and then I'd have to deduce in my mind
>> what level comment is this. It is very tedious to browse comments this way.
>>
>> Another way that might help me would be to figure out the level of the
>> current comment. At least I'd be able to move down through the
>> comments without reading them and without trying to deduce its level
>> from the contents.
>>
>> I can use Firefox, Google Chrome and IE, so I'd be happy to find a solution that works in any of these browsers.
>>
>> Any advice would be appreciated!
>> Tony
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>