objWatcher

This NVDA add-on watches changes to attributes of navigation objects.

• Authors: Cary-rowen ([email protected]), hwf1324 ([email protected])
• Compatibility: NVDA 2023.1 or later

Possible Use Cases

1. Subtitles and Lyrics Watching: Watch subtitle or lyric objects of certain players, enabling automatic reporting when they refresh.
2. Chat Activity Watching: Watch items of interest within group chat lists in messaging apps such as Unigram or WeChat. Automatically report new messages, even when working in the background.
3. Testing and Debugging: Watch the status bar of applications like Notepad to automatically report changes in rows and columns during editing.

Gestures

Watcher Layer Commands

Press NVDA+Alt+W to activate the watcher layer, where you can perform watching actions:

• Numeric Keys (0–9): Add the current navigator object to a specific position or report the status of an object already being watched at that position.
• Delete: Press once to remove the last watched object; press twice to remove all watched objects.
• T: Toggle the watch status of the current foreground window.
• P: Pause or resume all watching activities.
• Escape: Exit the watcher layer.

When entering the watcher layer, the add-on announces the current status:

• "No items are being watched. Please add items to watch."
• "Watching in progress. {n} items are being tracked."
• "Watching paused. {n} items in the watch list."

Other Gestures

The following actions are supported but have no default gestures assigned. Users can assign gestures to these actions via the Input Gestures dialog:

• Add current navigator object to watchlist.
  • Note: This action can only be assigned to gestures where the main key is a numeric key (0–9) with a modifier, such as NVDA+Alt+0–9.
• Toggle the watch status of the current window.
• Toggle pause/resume watching.
• Press once to delete the last watched object; press twice to delete all watched objects.

Settings

Access the settings panel from NVDA’s Preferences menu to configure the following options:

• Watcher Timer Interval: Set the watching interval in milliseconds (default is 100ms)

Contributors

• Authors:

  • Cary-rowen: Core developer
  • hwf1324: Code contributor
  • Ibrahim Hamadeh: Code contributor

• Localization Contributors:

  • Ibrahim Hamadeh: Arabic Translation
  • VovaMobile: Ukrainian Translation

Feel free to let me know the names of other localization contributors in any way you like.

Contribution

1. Submit Pull Requests (PRs) for new features or localized translations via GitHub.
2. Report bugs or provide feedback through the GitHub Issues page.

Release Notes

Version 1.0.2

• Fixed document Markdown rendering issue.

Version 1.0.1

• Fixed duplicate objects being added
• Other improvements

Version 1.0.0

• Added watcher layer commands (NVDA+Alt+W).
• Introduced watching feature for multiple objects.
• Introduced quick watching of the foreground window.
• Support pause/resume watching.

Version 0.4.5

• Localization updates.

Version 0.4.4

• Supported "speak on demand" mode for NVDA 2024.1.
• Localization updates.

Version 0.4.0

• Introduced a configurable timer interval for watching objects.