HandPositionsDescriber.getDistanceProgressString() is not idempotent

[zepumph]

We are running into a problem here over in #413 because we want to use the "closer/farther" distance-progress strings in both description and voicing. When you call that function, it registers the previous value and overwrites the distance. It was designed to be called only when delivering an alert to the user during interaction. So in addition to the challenge of using it for both description and voicing, updating it eagerly, like we do for the object response, will not work.

[zepumph]

This would be nice to do so that @terracoda can test voicing with distance-region AND distance-progress these days

Index: js/common/view/RatioHalf.ts
IDEA additional info:
Subsystem: com.intellij.openapi.diff.impl.patch.CharsetEP
<+>UTF-8
===================================================================
diff --git a/js/common/view/RatioHalf.ts b/js/common/view/RatioHalf.ts
--- a/js/common/view/RatioHalf.ts	(revision 761e35ea3f4c79a09fbc1350e89bc4a791f43c4d)
+++ b/js/common/view/RatioHalf.ts	(date 1642202950465)
@@ -291,7 +291,9 @@
 
         a11yCreateAriaValueText: createObjectResponse,
         voicingCreateObjectResponse: createObjectResponse,
-        a11yCreateContextResponseAlert: () => this.getSingleHandContextResponse(),
+
+        // TODO: comment back in once https://github.com/phetsims/ratio-and-proportion/issues/416 is fixed
+        // a11yCreateContextResponseAlert: () => this.getSingleHandContextResponse(),
         voicingCreateContextResponse: () => this.getSingleHandContextResponse(),
         a11yDependencies: options.a11yDependencies.concat( [ options.ratioLockedProperty ] ),
         voicingNameResponse: options.accessibleName // accessible name is also the voicing name response

[zepumph]

Committed in 71ae824

[zepumph]

Fixed above, it was easiest to create a separate instance of HandPositionsDescriber that was just for voicing. Then I also had to split up the "previous" region for both hands vs single.