[Blind-sysadmins] Re: Reviewing the top line of the window in Windows Terminal

Thank you, Bill. As you note in the PR comment, there's also a case for moving to the beginning/end of the whole buffer in some circumstances. Mac OS solves this by having separate review commands for moving to "visible beginning" and the actual beginning - in the case of the terminal, the entire buffer. I'll gladly test this when it reaches an NVDA beta release. On 8/5/22 16:35, Bill Dengler wrote:

Jason, I'm the author of NVDA's Windows Terminal (and UI Automation console) support. I've opened a PR that should hopefully make things work more as you'd expect: https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/pull/13671

Bill -----Original Message----- From: Jason White via Blind-sysadmins Sent: Friday, 22 April 2022 09:18 To: 'Mailing list for blind system administrators' Cc: Jason White Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Reviewing the top line of the window in Windows Terminal

In Windows Terminal (running Windows 11, build 22000.613), with either JAWS or NVDA as the screen reader, the screen reader’s command to move the review cursor to the top of the window doesn’t always work as expected.

If I clear the screen, or if I’m using some terminal application over ssh that does so, move to top of window does exactly that.

However, if I run a PowerShell or Linux shell command that involves a pager (e.g., “man intro” in Linux or “get-help gci -full” in PowerShell), the results are different. After pressing Space one or more times to move through consecutive screens in the pager, the screen reader’s move to top of window command takes the review cursor at least to the first “page” in the pager – if not further back in my command history.

I suspect there’s a scroll-back buffer maintaining the session history and that “top of window” is being taken as the start of the scroll-back buffer. The Mac OS terminal has exactly this issue – except that, on the Mac, there’s a “move to visible beginning” command in VoiceOver which is supposed to take you to the top of what is on screen, discounting the scroll-back. Admittedly, it doesn’t always work reliably.

However, in Windows Terminal, it’s interesting that going to the top of the window actually works if a screen clear operation has recently been issued – or so it appears.

Is there a way to move a review cursor in Windows Terminal to the actual first line currently displayed?

Note that the GNOME and MATE terminals under Linux are the most accessible implementation that I’ve found in a graphical environment. In that case, moving the review cursor in Orca to the top of the window works, but I can also use keyboard commands in the terminal (Shift-Page-UP and Shift-Page-Down) to move through the scroll-back history.

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