[Accessibility] Cannot trace collaborators' cursor location

[jooyoungseo]

Type: Bug

Thanks for creating a wonderful extension. This has a lot of potential for those who cannot use the original Overleaf UI. Blind people who use screen reader have some critical issues with the Overleaf's inaccessible web interface and its editor, and this kind of VSCode extension can offer an alternative and accessible workaround!

Although the extension is usable itself, I was wondering if you could consider some more accessible features implemented in ms-vsliveshare.vsliveshare. For example, currently, there is no easy way for screen reader users to identify or follow collaborator's cursor location.

It would be great if we had some features like teathering user's cursor with collaborator's cursor and jumping to a collaborator location.

This will contribute to improving the accessibility of collabrotive editing a lot!

Extension version: 0.5.1
VS Code version: Code - Insiders 1.85.0-insider (c6b48c364dde70c12bf977f1da50acda0fd801e3, 2023-11-30T05:35:40.559Z)
OS version: Windows_NT x64 10.0.22631
Modes:

System Info

Item	Value
CPUs	11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1145G7 @ 2.60GHz (8 x 2611)
GPU Status	2d_canvas: enabled canvas_oop_rasterization: enabled_on direct_rendering_display_compositor: disabled_off_ok gpu_compositing: enabled multiple_raster_threads: enabled_on opengl: enabled_on rasterization: enabled raw_draw: disabled_off_ok video_decode: enabled video_encode: enabled vulkan: disabled_off webgl: enabled webgl2: enabled webgpu: enabled
Load (avg)	undefined
Memory (System)	15.71GB (6.40GB free)
Process Argv	--crash-reporter-id b05b88e5-8894-4031-ae34-fa034ebddea9
Screen Reader	yes
VM	0%

A/B Experiments

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[iamhyc]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I have not used the Live Share before. I will first do the survey to see how it works.

As for the screen reader being able to track the cursors' location, I am not sure if it is possible with the limitations of the vscode API.
Currently, these "cursors" are actually not real cursors, but just "zero-width rectangles" plotted at the character position.

[iamhyc]

Hi @jooyoungseo , I have read the doc you shared for the accessibility feature in vscode live share.
I can tell that it basically enhance the accessibility via playing sounds to notify various events.
Unfortunately, as vscode does not provide any public API for audio or accessibility now, I am not going to exhaust myself with the sound features.

Instead, I can add the cursor jump and tether functions to improve the experience for screen reader users.
I will first add the "jump to collaborators" function via command palette in the next release v0.5.3, which is easy to implement.
The tethering thing requires a smooth and consistent update of cursor position in relation to editing, which may require extras works, and I plan to do it later.