Good Day: I'm like you as far as using a computer and reading
email for years. It would seem like you set an item in the screen
reader to find the time stamps in the background in order to go to
the newest information. This is just a guest on my part, however,
why couldn't something like this be tried.
Dave
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
On 8/26/2020 2:37 PM, Brian Vogel
wrote:
I don't know whether this is something NVDA (or any screen reader)
should address, or if the issue should be solved elsewhere, but a
screen reader then able to pick up the change.
It is very, very common practice for e-mail conversations to take
on a "quote, reply, quote, reply, quote, reply" format. This is
all the more true when a very long exchange is taking place,
involving multiple participants, and it would be entirely unclear
what was being responded to without retaining something from a
prior message or messages to set the stage.
In "the old days" of plain text email, quotation was indicated by
the presence of the greater than character, >, at the beginning
of a line and the number of greater thans indicated how many times
something had been quoted, as there are often quotes that quote
previous quotes. While this certainly worked, it was visually
very messy as quote depth increased.
Now in the age of HTML e-mail, the use of characters to indicate
quotation has gone by the wayside and now visual bars are used in
much the same manner. They're semi-transparent and for each
requotation another bar appears, so if someone had quoted someone
else who had already quoted someone before them, there would be
three bars stacked, to show who quoted what.
In any event, for those of us who can see, we are able to scan the
page visually and jump almost instantly to the new material that
resides beneath each quote sequence after reading whatever portion
of the quoted material they need to in order to get themselves up
to speed before reading that new material.
I have never found a way for a screen reader user to do "direct
jumps" to new material with a screen reader. Screen readers don't
seem to differentiate in any meaningful way between quoted and
fresh material, and give screen reader users a way to jump between
chunks of that fresh material when they wish to do so.
Am I missing something? Is there already a way this can be done
with ease? If there is, I don't know what it is and I have plenty
of evidence that most screen reader users don't, either, even
those who've been using them for a very, very long time.
If there isn't, is there some roadblock to making a screen reader
able to recognize where quoted text ends and new material begins?
Since there has to be something behind the scenes that creates
those bar structures that I see, I have to believe that a screen
reader has access to that same information, and that it would be
relatively simply (note, relatively) to create a keyboard shortcut
that causes all quoted material to be skipped and focus thrown to
the first word of the unquoted material after it.
I've been using e-mail since the 1980s, and I can say without
question that the custom in the blind community of putting all new
content at the top is not even close to universal. And given how
well a "quote response quote response" format is for sighted email
users, it's never going to go away. It seems there should be some
way for screen reader users to do the rough equivalent of reading
whatever part of the quoted material they might wish, but after
having heard it being able to jump instantly past any that follows
where they've stopped and go straight to the new material beneath
the quote.
I know that there are a number of regulars here who are NVDA
developers, add-on developers, or similarly positioned to have a
lot of insight about this, so I'm asking.
--
Brian - Windows 10
Pro, 64-Bit, Version 2004, Build 19041
A
gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings
unintentionally.
~ Oscar Wilde
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