On Feb 2, 2009, at 9:33 AM, E.J. Zufelt wrote:
Like it or not a screen-reader is an alternate interface, why not
take advantage of it?
I think you miss the point of your own comment here.
A screen reader is an alternate interface, not an alternate
operating system.
Thus, the screen reader should do what the original interface does,
(differently certainly), and if necessary it should provide methods
to hook to those things we can't access any other way either because
the initial interface hard coded them, or because they're not
practical to implement in the same way, but that should have no
bearing on it's functionality, a screen reader enables a visually
impaired user to do everything a sighted person can do with the
computer. If the screen reader wants to provide additional
capabilities, then at that point, it's no longer just a screen
reader it then becomes an entirely new access method.
I can't stress enough what I have said repeatedly both here and to
apple directly.
The screen reader's job is to read the screen, it's the user's job
to interpret what the screen reader is reading.
There's entirely too many cases in voice over where it tries to do
too much for the user, and screws things up for the unweary user, or
even flat out speaks things wrong because it can't tell which one of
several alternative things it should do.
If I wanted something to interpret my screen contents, I'd have a
sighted person tell me what's on the screen, that would be much
faster, and they'd skip everything they thought I didn't want to know.
If I want to know what's on the screen, (everything on the screen)
then a screen reader is the only option, but it's extremely
frustrating to have the screen reader doing things I didn't tell it
to do, just because the designers think they know better what i want
than I do.
This is my biggest complaint with windows, it becomes nearly
unusable once you reace a particular technical proficiency because
it's always assuming you want to do this or that when really what
you want is to do this other thing.
Sure, you can make it do this other thing, but it takes 25 extra
steps to make it happen.
I don't want voiceover to turn into another windows application.
Stick to reading the screen, and leave the interpreting to me.
As stated before, I can't count the number of times I've lost work
time trying to figure out what was wrong with source code, or why a
particular file didn't exist when I tried to open it in a custom
app, because vo pronounced something wrong. (I.E. carroll for some
silly reason gets pronounced carrolton.
What's the sense in that?
There's litterally hundreds of these kinds of little details in vo
that piss me off to no end, and my constant complaints to apple
about such things are largely shrugged off, it seems apple is going
to stick to their interpreting for you regardless of what you want,
and I for one am getting rather tired of it.
The rest of the system is perfectly usable, and I love my mac, don't
get me wrong, but everyone has their breaking point, and if the next
few releases of osx don't fix some of these issues, Im leaving and
going back to linux, there's no sense beating your head against a
brick wall.
Wasting 10-20 minutes trying to figure out why a piece of code isn't
working because voiceover interprets something and says it wrong
isn't my idea of a good time.
Sure, I could go over my source, character-by-character, but that
would take even longer. A person has to be able to depend on their
screen reader to give them the information they need, and if vo
continues telling me what it thinks I want to hear, instead of
what's actually there, it's going to cause me even more lost
productivity, and I'm not willing to accept that performance hit.
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