[macvoiceover] Screen Resolution

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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