[macvoiceover] Re: Screen Resolution

  • From: Chris Hofstader <cdh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: macvoiceover@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2009 07:20:46 -0400

If this is true then I withdraw my ignorant statement of yesterday. I made the assumption that, at least on the iPhone, the control help would not be visible as it is only meaningful to VO users because VO changes the meanings of various gestures. Also, my wife has never mentioned them so I assumed they weren't visible.


I agree that it would be good to show them.

cdh
On Aug 16, 2009, at 1:25 PM, David Poehlman wrote:

Too bad, showing them could benefit some folk. I think vo shows the help tags on the screen and if I am not mistaken, the windows ats do it now too.

On Aug 16, 2009, at 1:12 PM, Chris Hofstader wrote:

The little announcements about how to operate a control are not shown on the screen. We introduced "control help" in JAWS a real long time ago and, as far as I've seen, virtually every other screen reader has implemented it in some form or another.

It was one of those ideas that came out of an Friday afternoon bull session and that I am very glad that we published it before we thought about patenting it. I hate software patents in general but holding a monopoly on a feature that may make things better for people with a disability, especially by companies who profit entirely from people with disabilities is deplorable.

Off of soapbox...

cdh

On Aug 16, 2009, at 9:09 AM, David Poehlman wrote:

ok, a question to which I think I know the answer. the hints we hear on the iphone such as: "double tap to open" double tap to edit" and so on. they are not seen right?

On Aug 16, 2009, at 7:02 AM, Chris Hofstader wrote:

In this context, context refers to a screen reader providing more than a linear stream of syllables and pauses to the user.

To wit (going back to the days of these meetings) JAWS had lots of augmentations to the data that a user could employ to add extra dimensions to the information being presented without adding extra time.

Code Factory's touch screen interface took it all a step further on an iPAQ where one could jump from place to place once they had learned what was where so the linear presentation model was further removed.

The iPhone goes a step further by doing all of this without adding "invisible" layers onto the screen that we can hear but the sighties cannot see. The iPhone model, therefore, makes it all the easier to use and it permits lots of jumping around without needing to listen to a bunch of junk we do not care about.

I also find the Item Chooser in VO in the big Mac OS to be an interesting way to go to all sorts of data items even if you don't know if it's a button, link, header, text, etc. With this structure placed upon often difficult interfaces, the linear nature is removed once again and and efficiency increases.

This is the short form explanation. If you want the whole banana give me a call as hands hurt and I can't type much today.

Happy Hacking,
cdh

















On Aug 15, 2009, at 2:35 PM, David Poehlman wrote:

what is meant by context in this context?

On Aug 15, 2009, at 1:48 PM, Chris Hofstader wrote:

Also, the interoperable interface grew out of the ATIA AT/IT Compatibility group. We had nearly everyone worthwhile at the table (Apple, (MBJ) Microsoft (MadMack), Sun (Peter), FS (me), AI (Ben), IBM (June) and a few others whom I can no longer remember), our mission was to come up with a universal accessibility API so developers working on cross platform code could get the accessibility without tweaking for each separate OS. Sadly, time and release schedules got in the way. MS was the first to pull out and take what we have, combine it with their automation layer and call it UIA. Apple was next to go as the Tiger was growling and, if you look closely at the API, it looks quite a lot like the gnome accessibility API upon which orca is built. Sun and IBM stayed in until the bitter end and their result was gnome.

My contribution was jumping up and down on tables yelling that context was very important and, if you read some of the Apple propaganda about iPhone, the word "context" appears all over the accessibility portions. I am proud to have contributed in my little way six or seven years ago (gnome also has cool features for context but I'm not sure any developers or AT use it yet).

Just rambling...,
On Aug 15, 2009, at 7:55 AM, David Poehlman wrote:

For years, I did not regard screen resolution as a factor in vo use for the reasons you site, I however discovered that when someone asked me to change my screen resolution to 800x600 on my macbook so they could see it better, performance degraded till I returned it to 1024x768 so go figure. it is also true that setting springloaded files and folders unchecked and effect to scale instead of geeni effect improves vo performance and it should not. There are other possible factors at work here as well. for instance, I've experimented with desktop colors and stuff as well as font but the results have been mixed. Apple used to talk about an aqua interface. I don't know if that referred to only one of several or it was the only one they had but they were specific in mentioning it in regard to vo.


On Aug 15, 2009, at 7:42 AM, Chris Hofstader wrote:

Hey Dudes and Dudettes,

VoiceOver gets 100% of its information from very specific sources in the OSX UI layer and, perhaps, elsewhere in the OS. Nothing in VO, if our friends at Apple are telling the truth (we've no reason to doubt them), can be effected by screen resolution. This points to a bare truth that no matter what your resolution may be, VO should functionally behave identically.

When I first saw screen resolution mentioned as a factor in VO performance, I tried a number of experiments (all were negative) and added in some thought experiments and found only one possibility: if a user has their screen resolution set too low and has a "smart monitor" the system may "clip" windows and their contents as the Cocoa layer may try to paing things that will not fit into the viewport.

So, if different users are getting different results while running at different screen resolutions the flaw is virtually impossible to have been caused by screen rez.

There is a lot of folklore embedded into the minds of people who used JAWS and/or Window-Eyes quite a number of years ago. When, in JAWS, we removed all of the resolution problems we knew about, our technical support people refused to believe the engineers and continued telling users to try changing their resolution which never seemed to actually solve the problem. Today, bothVoiceOver and orca run via a similar sort of API and should not have any trouble regarding hardware sorts of stuff like screen resolution or color depth.

The tribal knowledge in this community and the lore of AT past continues to be repeated even though only a small number of problems in very specific applications on Windows still require a specific set of hardware settings.

So, as we can eliminate screen resolution as the culprit, let's dig deeper and find the other differences between one user and the next when chasing bugs that don't repeat nicely

Happy Hacking,
cdh

PS: For a lot of good stuff about API based screen readers, check out Peter Korn's blog as he has been advocating for this model while was still fighting for an OSM solution. Peter is one of the major pioneers of this kind of system and he deserves a lot of credit for evangelizing about it.

PPS: If anyone wants to call me regarding these sorts of issues my number in the summer is 727-656-1867 (actually, this is my number all year round as it is my mobile phone and goes everywhere with me). I'm also BlindChristian on Skype but I'm rarely online.









2009, at 5:57 PM, Cheryl Homiak wrote:

No, this has nothing to do with the Apple menu; this is jumping in apps. The resolution is a possibility. But, David, please be specific; how does Carla turn off her trackpad functionality?

Thanks for the ideas; we'll check them out.

--
Cheryl
"Let the words of my mouth,
and the meditation of my heart,
be acceptable in thy sight,
O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer."
(Psalm 19:14  Bible KJV)






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