Verbosity levels

[jteh]

Many users have requested different verbosity levels in NVDA. There are many aspects to consider for this functionality.

• There are already verbosity settings to control various announcements; e.g. punctuation, object presentation settings, document formatting settings and virtual buffer settings.
• I do not think these settings should be forceably changed when a particular verbosity level is selected.
  • Otherwise, there is no way for the user to change the verbosity level without affecting other settings.
• Despite this objection, some users want default configuration for a given level of verbosity.
  • Perhaps this should be separate somehow? i.e. There would be an option to configure default settings for a given verbosity level which the user could choose if desired.

[jteh]

Aleksey's original patch

[aleksey_s]

following is my thoughts:
for nvda scripts to be more friendly and not to clutter up
code by a lot of checks, we can create module e.g. messages.py in which we can store all verbosity-dependents messages in some dictionary and function msg(str) which will return verbosity-specific msg (as _() returns language specific msg). we can have nvda settings dialog named "Verbosity" with list of verbosity levels and checkbox to force default verbosity configuration.
if you agree with this way i can start to implement it becouse i myself need such feature :-)

[aleksey_s]

i want to know what developers thing on it. i hope i can implement it myself.

[pvagner]

Guys here are my thoughts:
1) I think settings in the object presentation, virtual buffers and other formatting settings should not affect verbosity levels. I can remember there was a discussion somewhere that we might introduce application specific settings or even ability to store all the settings into profiles. This is the right way on how to manage the groups of settings I believe.
2) If verbosity has to affect NVDA's speech otput then I do like Aleksey's proposal. There should be dictionary of actions and verbosity levels and NVDA should be able to request an appropriate message based off of the desired verbosity level when it has something to speak E.G. result of a script etc.
Although this does not sound very profesional but another fact to consider is we might assign some more variables to scripts besides docstring in order to be able to bind the messages to it.

[tvalusek]

Let's try looking at this from different point of view:

I can still use sight, so I currently have no screen reader loaded, since I don't need its chatter. But what I'd like to have is all its powers and abilities, accessed "on demand". So there should be an option to tell NVDA "Don't say anything until asked", and verbosity settings should be combined with synthesizer/voice setting in a facility called "profile" - but that's for another ticket ...

[pvagner]

Hello,
ability to speak on demand is already possible. You can use NVDA+s to switch speech mode to off and return it back when needed. Or are you seeking for something different? This is all fine the thing I am trying to accomplish with these postings is to define what is verbosity level's business and what can be put aside for the configuration profiles or possibly application specific settings.

[Bernd]

Hello guys,
I would like such a feature. So I ask you Is there still work on this ticket?

[aleksey_s]

Replying to Bernd:
as core developers didn't reply yet, i don't work on it right now.

[clev]

Supose that I'm selecting the word "text" with shift + right arrow, letter by letter. Currently, NVDA says "selecting" plus the letter I selected. One cannot by as productive as if it was possible to turn of the word "selecting", so that NVDA would say just the letters. Thus, this is a needed verbosity option, so that one doesn't need to manually modify speech.py and solve conflicts when updating the sources.