Placing Components On A Form Using The Keyboard lazarus / 6-IDE-CodeTools ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jingles · 2009-09-21 23:15 Hello everyone, This is pretty much directed at the project developers. I am trying to use Lazarus under Windows.  I've been using Delphi for a couple of years now and like it a lot.  Lazarus and FPC being multi- platform products seemed like a good option. I am visually impaired and use a screen reader called Jaws.  There are other screen readers out there and the fact that I use a particular one isn't all that important.  When I first started to look at the IDE I was encouraged because the source editor and the dialogs seemed to mostly be accessible to my screen reader.  However the forms manager has one very important show stopper.  There is no way to place a component on a form without using the mouse or at least none that I can find.  In Delphi I can go to View/Tool Palette from the menu and find the component I want by going through a list.  When I've located the component I want I just press the enter key and the component is dropped somewhere near the middle of the form.  I can then use the object inspector to adjust the top, left, width, hight and other properties.  Also in Delphi I can use tab and backtab to move among the controls once they are on the form.  Pressing enter will bring up the properties of the control which has focus. It's my hope that the developers might see this message and consider putting this functionality into Lazarus.  Lazarus has a useful dialog under VIEW/Components where you can see the entire list of components.  Possibly this dialog could be enhanced to include another button that would allow the selected component to be dropped onto the form.  Given what has already been done with this IDE I would think the above enhancement should be pretty straight forward. Believe it or not there are quite a number of blind developers out there.  Personally I have been working with GUI aps since VB 1.0 back in the early/mid 90's. With a few of the right features these IDE's can be usable for a blind developer. Barry ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul Ishenin · 2009-09-22 00:22 Hello, First of all thanks for you nice suggestions. Next, please test our 0.9.29 development version - there I've already implemented Tab, Shift+Tab jumping through the components on a form. Also arrow keys work to select nearest components in the 2 dimensions. I will look what can I do among other requests you did. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul Ishenin · 2009-09-22 01:13 With revision 21811 you will also get Enter/Return key working in the designer (show and focus object inspector). With revision 21812 you can press Enter/Return key in the components dialog and selected component will be added to the active form. Please test both and give me some feedback. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jingles · 2009-09-22 01:57 Quote from: Paul Ishenin on September 22, 2009, 03:13:05 amWith revision 21811 you will also get Enter/Return key working in the designer (show and focus object inspector). With revision 21812 you can press Enter/Return key in the components dialog and selected component will be added to the active form. Please test both and give me some feedback. Hi Paul, Thanks so much for the prompt response.  Revision 21812 if it works as you say will be exactly what Is needed.  Right now the latest revision I see is 21809 so I will wait until 21812 is posted.  This all looks really promising! Barry ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul Ishenin · 2009-09-22 02:41 If you want to use development versions of lazarus then svn check out is the best way for you. It is not a difficult task to build lazarus from the source code. Foolow the next linkfor instructions. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jingles · 2009-09-23 00:16 Ok I just tested with 21813 and I can report a huge improvement.  Using Jaws I can now place controls on a form.  To test I created a form with an edit box, a button and a slider.  Not only was I able to create the form but when the app ran the controls behaved as they normally would.  Wonderful! I did notice a couple of things though.  To place a control on the form I had to highlight the component and then double click the mouse.  The enter key still doesn't work.  That's not a show stopper because screen readers all have ways to manipulate the mouse.  The only requirement is that there needs to be something the screen reader can recognize like a piece of text or a graphic drawn with standard windows conventions.  In this case the component list was trackable by Jaws so there was no problem. Also I noticed the buttons in the IDE (OK or Yes/NO etc) have changed from the stable version.  Jaws just sees them as graphics but as long as graphics are unique I can label them and have whatever I want spoken.  For example lets say that Jaws comes to a graphic and it might say something like "graphic 959" but its really an Ok button.  I could tell Jaws that whenever it encounters "graphic 959" to say Ok and as long as you don't change the graphic from build to build its just fine. I tried tabbing from control to control in the form designer once the controls were drawn but pressing the enter key didn't do anything as far as I could tell. Not a big problem since I can use the object inspector. Please please don't remove these changes. Barry ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul Ishenin · 2009-09-23 00:58 Sorry, probably we don't understand each-other 1. You asked for a way of adding components to the form without the moouse. To do so press Alt+V (view menu) + C (components). In the components dialog select any component you want and press Enter. As result component will be added to the current form. 2. For tabbing between components on a form press Tab key or arrow keys. To open object inspector for selected components press Enter or F11 key. And why should we remove these changes ?