Selecting text with keyboard.send_keys from within an autokey script?

Question

Rather than selecting text and then triggering the script, I'd like my script to select the text. I thought I could select text with keyboard navigation (e.g., "<shift>+<ctrl>+<left>" to select the word to the left of the cursor. I can do that and the word appears to be getting highlighted in gedit, but if I follow that with clipboard.get_selection(), I get an exception that no text is selected.

# Select the word to the left of the cursor:
keyboard.send_keys("<shift>+<ctrl>+<left>")

# Try to get the current selection (fails with "No text found in X selection"):
try:
    name = clipboard.get_selection()
except BaseException as err:
    dialog.info_dialog('error', 'autokey script exception: {0}'.format(err))

Am I doing something wrong? Or is what I'm trying to do not possible with autokey?