Re: [Pan-users] blind user of pan

[Duncan]

seth Hurst posted on Fri, 2 Sep 2022 04:05:05 -0400 as excerpted:

> Is there a better way for reading of messages? Right now I'm
> copy/pasting into a separate  text editor to read messages because orca
> will not read the article bodies. I would like a more streamlined way of
> doing this but for now I guess it works. Great news reader.

Sighted user here so I can't say for sure whether any of these suggestions 
will work, but there's several things I'd try.  This assumes the menus are 
appropriately accessible but I guess they are or you'd not have gotten 
this far.  Anyway, four suggestions, first three in order from guessed 
most likely to work to least likely, with the forth I'd guess actually 
more likely to work than the first, but also more hassle, thus its last 
listing.

1) Tabbed layout (as opposed to the default multipane view).  The checkbox 
for this is on the View menu, Layout, Tabbed Layout.  The result should be 
a set of three tabs shown one at a time, group, header, body, instead of 
three panes.  In the same place  there's also menu entries to jump to each 
of the three tabs.  IIRC there's hotkeys for the functions too, but I've 
long had mine customized so I can't say what the defaults are.

With any luck orca will be able to read the article body when the body tab 
is displayed.

2) Paned layout, but temporarily hide the group and header panes so only 
the body pane is shown.  Again under View, Layout, there's separate 
toggles for each of the panes.  Again, the hope is that if the group and 
header panes are hidden so only the body pane is available, that'll let 
orca read it.

3) Toggle expanded/collapsed body title area.

Unfortunately I'm not sure this is accessible so you may need a sighted 
helper to toggle it, but at the top of the body pane there's a header-
display section that can be collapsed into a single line or expanded into 
several.  Double-clicking the section toggles it.  The idea here would be 
that perhaps toggling that will let orca read the actual body content that 
appears below this section.

4) Try using pan's external editor functionality.  This takes a different 
tact and would need to be done for each message so would be more hassle, 
but OTOH I'm guessing will be most likely to actually work.

First you'll need to setup an external editor in pan's preferences, 
applications tab, text editor.  Setup your choice there.

Once that's set, for the first message you need to want to read and 
possibly reply to, followup-reply to open pan's posting window (post menu, 
followup to newgroup), then in the resulting window, edit menu, run 
editor.  This should open the message as a reply in your chosen editor, 
which presumably orca knows how to handle properly or it wouldn't be your 
chosen editor.

If that works suitably there's an option in the same menu to always run 
editor.  You can set that and at least avoid manually opening the external 
editor each time, but you'll still need to "followup" to the message in 
ordered to open that external editor.

Hopefully one of those works.  FWIW, after several years with very little 
even basic maintenance pan only recently got a new maintainer and switched 
from gtk2 to gtk3 components which are only now reasonably stable.  I 
believe in general gtk3 offers far better accessibility opportunities with 
less work, which I'd guess it why pan's working as well as it is for you, 
but given the lower testing accessibility gets there's sure to be bugs in 
that still and you're the first I've seen reporting them.  So you're 
already helping to fix them by just posting this. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman