Indentone has been deprecated

Say bye bye to the Indentone addon for NVDA! :-)

A few months ago, I wrote about indentone. The addon is now in NVDA 2016.4, and thus the addon is not necessary. To turn on line indent reporting with tones, select document formatting from preferences, and then select report line indentation using tones (Alt+i).

The combobox has 4 options:

  •  Off: No indent is reported.
  • Speech: the old behavior. If you use indentone, you don't want this.
  • Tones: Just report indents with tones.
  • both speech and tones: Reports with both of them.

A tab is 4 spaces, this isn't configurable. If your indent gets beyond 72 spaces, or 18 tabs, you will hear speech not a tone. This is so that we don't hurt your ears. For the technically curious, the work happened on ticket #5906, and #6057 was the pull request.

Musically curious people will love that each space is represented with a quarter tone, giving a tab a whole tone. The first note, (0 indents) is an A3, at 220 HZ. There are 3 octaves of indents reported, and after that, the system resorts to speech. Mixed tab/spaces will report indents, which is something to be aware of. Also, stereo has been removed, as it is unnecessary and counterproductive on users who aren't using headphones.

With Indentone in NVDA, I wish my fellow coders a much more productive life coding. Please enjoy this feature. Thanks goes to Jamie from NV Access for helping me design the NVDA implementation, Mick from NV Access for helping me track down a bug in the NVDA implementation after I looked at it stumped on how to fix it, Chris Toth of Accessible apps for convincing me to get this thing out to as many coders as possible, and Camlorn for some help getting the correct equation for figuring out what tone to play and the volume hack in the addon but not in NVDA (Yes, I did look at how you did volume in unspoken originally). With Indentone, blind people now have a very natural way to visualize indentation in code, and the excuses about indentation being useless for blind people should be minimized since technology to avoid this has now  been mainstreamed.