Accessibility in conversation window
For people using screen readers, the conversation window could benefit from a minor (but extremely important) fix: Miranda has set in place a feature of "automatic scroll down" in the conversation. For blind users in particular, it means that each time a new message arrives, the cursor moves to this new message. When trying to follow a conversation with multiple persons, this is a nightmare, it's almost impossible to follow before anyone adds a new message.
On opening the conversation window, one will see an edit field where one can type messages to send. If tab is pressed, then the focus is moved to the list of messages in the conversation. By default, the cursor tends to move to the end of this list which is annoying in itself. But the real issue comes when someone in the conversation posts a new message. The focus is automatically moved to the end of the conversation, probably for visual reasons (identical to an autoscroll). For us who haven't been able to read previous messages, this is extremely annoying, the more so when trying to follow a conversation in IRC involving tens of people.
How to fix? A plugin to disable this very feature seems like overkill, but perhaps a simple setting could be added. There are other, less important accessibility issues in the conversation window so having an "accessibility" tab would make sense and show that the community does care about such things 9which is still nice even for other users). That being said, it's just a suggestion, and perhaps the fix already exists.
Thank you for your help,
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Robert Kingett commented
I tried to vote, but was unsure if it went through. Anyway, I second this completely!
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Anonymous commented
Thanks, tested that. The fact that autoscroll is disabled for "large windows" isn't helpful, the message we want to read might be just the previous one. And of course, this behavior occurs when you send a new message too. F12 actually seems to kinda work, it "blocks" the message stream, so you can read... but you don't receive new messages in this mode. If you want to "unblock", press F12 again and that does exactly the same thing, scroll to the bottom of the window. So no improvement in terms of accessibility :( .
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right now (in 0.95.10.3) in SRMM & Scriver autoscroll is disabled automatically when you scroll log window up (i.e. a new message is added below the window border).
in tabSRMM you can press F12 to disable autoscroll in any window