Re: Reading word at mouse pointer w/o Universal Access
Re: Reading word at mouse pointer w/o Universal Access
- Subject: Re: Reading word at mouse pointer w/o Universal Access
- From: Nir Soffer <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2008 02:21:18 +0200
On Feb 29, 2008, at 03:27, Ryan Homer wrote:
I've read this post (http://lists.apple.com/archives/accessibility-
dev/2006/Aug/msg00007.html) about using the accessibility options
to read the text under the cursor. However, this requires that the
user enable access for assistive devices in System Preferences. The
application must therefore check for that. It also seems quite
complicated; I don't want to have to deal with glyphs and the like
- I only want the text under the cursor, full stop.
The Dictionary application is able to read a word under the cursor
without enabling access for assistive devices.
Does anyone therefore know of an alternative way to do this?
You can write a service which let the user to select some text and
pass it to the service. This will be easy to develop and support, but
not useful as the built-in dictionary app.
More risky alternative is an input manager, which let poke into any
Cocoa app data you like without enabling accessibility. However,
input managers are deprecated and may stop working at some point in
the future. Writing input manager is easy, but not well documented.
For input manager examples, see:
- http://www.lorax.com/FreeStuff/TextExtras.html - The original input
manager example code. Show how to watch the first responder which you
can use to access the text bellow the cursor.
- http://www.culater.net/software/SIMBL/SIMBL.php - framework for
loading input managers
There is related discussion here: <http://switchersblog.com/
2007/08/31/the-end-of-the-input-manager-and-pimping-mac-os-x.html>
Another more evil alternative is APE <http://www.unsanity.org/> - it
will let you access any app data.
Best Regards,
Nir Soffer
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