Re: [h-e-w] How to use the menubar with keyboard?

[Jonathan Epstein]

Tuomas,

I have followed this discussion with interest since some of us with physical 
disabilities use voice recognition software to control Emacs, including its 
menus.  In particular, many of us use a commercial product called Dragon 
NaturallySpeaking Professional.

It turns out that there are problems with getting NaturallySpeaking to 
recognize the Emacs menus, but you can work around it by "priming" each Emacs 
frame.  E.g., once an Emacs frame becomes the foreground Windows window, you 
can (by a variety of means) press and release the Alt key.  Once this is done, 
the standard NaturallySpeaking commands work correctly, e.g., "Click Tools", 
"Click Buffers", etc., to bring down the different menus.  I'm not sure what 
means Dragon is using to figure out the menu titles and how to select the right 
one (it points, clicks, and releases the mouse).  It doesn't appear to rely 
upon Windows Active Accessibility (AA), since I temporarily disabled that 
feature in NaturallySpeaking, and the menus selection still worked in Emacs 
(although I know that it doesn't work with some other applications like 
VisualStudio when AA is disabled).

My point is that if Dragon can do it, you can do it too!  But I'm not sure 
how...

Here are some links to a discussion from a few months ago:
   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VoiceCoder/message/1990
   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VoiceCoder/message/1993
You might need to subscribe to the VoiceCoder group to see these messages ... 
I'm not sure.

Oh, you might also want to peruse w32fns.c in the Emacs sources to see how the 
Alt key is managed by Emacs ... you might say over-managed ;-)

Hope this helps,

-Jonathan

At 05:35 AM 2/22/2002 , Tuomas Salo wrote:


>Jeff,
>
>thanks for the information. But my problem remains: it's not even nearly
>possible to push Alt-F for file menu. Besides, I can't find where to
>reconfigure the menu bar!  The main menu bar seems to be hardcoded to
>emacs.exe. (But I was unable to find it with a resource editor.) I
>experimented a little by changing the string "Options" to "O&tions" in the
>executable, which gave me a nice underlining ("O_t_ions"). I'd be happy to
>enter the accelerators to the source myself, if I ever them... Maybe I'll
>have to look at the sources again.
>
>The other problem:
>
>I tried all combinations of "(setq w32-alt-is-meta nil)" and/or "(setq
>w32-pass-alt-to-system t)", but the Alt key still seems to be intercepted
>by Emacs, since Alt-T doesn't open my custom "Otions" menu. Alt-F4
>or Alt-Space don't work either. I thought that w32-pass-alt-to-system
>should make them work, but apparently it doesn't.
>
>So, I'm still quite far from the standard Windows menu behavior.
>
>
>tuomas
>
>
>
>On Thu, 21 Feb 2002, Jeff Rancier wrote:
>
> > I have (thanks to someone on the list) the following function defined:
> > 
> > (defun jbr-w32-simulate-Alt-tap ()
> >   (interactive)
> >   (w32-send-sys-command 61696))
> > 
> > which I have bound to
> > 
> > (global-set-key   [C-tab]           'jbr-w32-simulate-Alt-tap)
> > 
> > Then I hit Ctrl-tab, the Buffers menu button depresses.  At that time I can
> > just hit any of the first letters of any other menu items, and then expand
> > if there's only one with that letter, or they toggle between multiple ones.
> > 
> > Jeff



Jonathan Epstein                                address@hidden
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