Re: Windows Emacs and screen readers

[Emilio Lopes]

Jason Rumney <jasonr <at> gnu.org> writes:

> 
> Nikhil Nair <nnair <at> pobox.com> writes:
> 
> > However, I suspect I was reinventing the wheel, as I found some posts on
> > this list from 3 years ago which talked about the use of the system caret,
> > and JAWS working well with the GUI version; Ben Key of Freedom Scientific
> > (who develop JAWS) seemed quite happy with the results.  What I couldn't
> > tell was whether this behaviour was in version 21.3, or whether I'd need a
> > later development version;
> 
> You need the later development version. Although the first changes to
> use the system caret were made in 2001, a few months before 21.1 was
> released, it was too close to the release to make it into 21.1, and
> subsequent releases have all been bugfix releases.
> 

Here is the documentation of the relevant user option:

   w32-use-visible-system-caret's value is nil

   Flag to make the system caret visible.
   When this is non-nil, Emacs will indicate the position of point by
   using the system caret instead of drawing its own cursor.  Some screen
   reader software does not track the system cursor properly when it is
   invisible, and gets confused by Emacs drawing its own cursor, so this
   variable is initialized to t when Emacs detects that screen reader
   software is running as it starts up.

   When this variable is set, other variables affecting the appearance of
   the cursor have no effect.

   Defined in `C source code'.