I’ve been working with someone who has very limited sight who describes their vision as being ‘a bit like looking through a keyhole into a smoke filled room’. Their process for writing is to touch-type a number of paragraphs or pages, and then, using macOS’s built in ‘text-to-speech’ function, listen back to whatever they just wrote until they reach a word or phrase they’re not happy with. They then search for said word or phrase using the search function in LibreOffice Writer, and attempt to edit it.
The problem is that they find it very difficult to locate the searched words on the screen, as they will be in a different position each time, and the transparent blue highlighting is not bright enough for them to clearly see. A solution might be to have an additional window that always appeared at the center of the document when searched words were found, containing the the words that were were searched, highlighted in a bright red (for example), with some context either side (5 words or maybe a sentence each side). Here is a rough diagram of how it might work -
Does anyone know if there is anything like this kind of functionality built into LibreOffice Writer? And if not what would be the best way to go about adding it? I’ve looked into developing these features for Writer myself, and while i think it could be doable, it’s not an area I have a lot of knowledge about. Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this kind of question, but any help is greatly appreciated as this is hopefully the last step before they can get back to a point where writing isn’t just seriously frustrating.
Thanks,
Francis
(edit: activated screenshot)