keyboard shortcut for annotations conflicts with the web developer tools in Windows

[amirsol81]

Thorium Reader has two hotkeys for annotation creation when text is selected:

1. Control+ALT+SHIFT+A, which opens a dialog for more text options.
2. Control+ALT+SHIFT+Q, which quickly creates an annotation.
   However, in the case of the first one, Thorium Reader erroneously opens the Developer Tools window. Actually two windows which should be closed with ALT+F4 to return to the book.
   And in the case of the second one, the quick annotation creation option, Thorium Reader just says the following: Alert no text selected.
   Note that text is indeed selected, from a word to several words, for both cases.
   This is on Windows 11 24H2 with NVDA.

[danielweck]

Note that text is indeed selected, from a word to several words, for both cases.

For the avoidance of doubt, the text is in fact not selected inside the webview that displays the HTML document (standard selection DOM Range), instead the selection only exists in the closed proprietary world of the screen reader. This is a known issue with screen readers in general. NVDA is working on a solution for Chromium which is the web browser engine used in Thorium (same as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, etc. etc.): #2814 (comment)

[danielweck]

As for the keyboard shortcut problem: this bug is reported for Windows, doesn't affect MacOS, not sure about Linux. Essentially, the combination of keys is already used by the Web Developer tools in Chromium, and it seems to take precedence over Thorium's own keyboard shortcut. Note that the developer tools are not activated in official releases, only in test builds. Still, this breaks the annotations workflow and needs to be fixed or worked around.

[nvdaes]

@danielweck , what about adding available features, at least some of them like bookmarks and annotations, via the context menu (shift+f10 on Windows)? The context menu exists noe and an option to inspect is presented. Perhaps adding bookmarks and annotations to the menu will also solve other issues with screen readers like knowing the corrent position if a click event is triggered.

[nvdaes]

Also, this may make Thorium more accessible for people with dexterity difficulties.

[danielweck]

what about adding available features, at least some of them like bookmarks and annotations, via the context menu (shift+f10 on Windows)? The context menu exists noe and an option to inspect is presented. Perhaps adding bookmarks and annotations to the menu will also solve other issues with screen readers like knowing the corrent position if a click event is triggered.

The context menu is currently only activated in test builds (as you discovered, to open the web inspector on the HTML element under the mouse pointer, inside the rendered publication HTML document or even in the application GUI).

With your screen reader, before invoking the context menu, do you need to position the mouse pointer over a specific GUI control, or HTML element / text character inside the publication document? Or does the screen reader maintain coordinates of what text it is currently speaking from its own virtual buffer, so that when the context menu is invoked, the mouse cursor is automatically moved to approximately where the spoken text is? (I imagine the context menu is anchored roughly in the middle center of HTML elements, so for a long paragraph of text it would be interesting to know exactly what happens)

thank you.

[nvdaes]

@danielweck , I think that the selected paragraph is not shown, or I don't find it in the inspector. I find a toolbar relater to synthesizer, a list etc.