[ossrp-control] Member Intro, Feature Suggestions and Questions

Hi list,
I thought I'd introduce myself and ask a couple of questions about the
screen reader.

I'm a 21-year-old sight immpaired FInnish guy and a lot into computers. I do
have a little sight left on my left eye: enough to use magnification but not
so much to be able to abandon screen reading completely. I prefer speech,
braille and the screen as output media in this order. FOr more info on my
sight, check out this Web-page:

http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/sight.html

As to development work I know C plus plus and Java at some level and have
done courses on software architectures
and object oriented design. Additionally, I'm naturaly into usability and
accessibility. In addition to human computer interaction basics and some GUi
design, I did beta test the screen reader for MacOs X 10.4 and am currently
beta testing Dolphin screen reading products.

My first question is whether it is possible to create plug-ins for the
screen reader or if there's some other extension mechanism for this purpose?
A plug-in based approach would promote customizability or even alternative
solutions to problems, in addition to enabling one to say emulate existing
screen readers.

I'd like to experiment with some ideas of my own or those that have been
proposed elswhere. Some examples:

a. I read in CSUN about conveying the current screen position with surround
sound. That would be great and I could actually try it out as I do have a
10x10 professional sound card for music and audio work. I think you should
arrange the speakers a litle unconventionally around the monitor, though,
such that moving up would mean up soundwise, too.

b. An optional redundancy filter could help in streamlining screen prompts.
That is it could compare the current and previous output and if there were
similar pieces, remove them possibly notifying the user. This way the
problems of file names, progress indicators or any other prompt text that is
at least partially redundant could be mostly eliminated.

c. Though this is only my personal take on things, I've got a very specific
idea of how a screen reader should work overall and why. I call it the
screen reading philosophy and have a whole page dealing with it as well as
with the feature suggestions at:

http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/free_screen_reader.html

Based on this page, any ideas as to what kind of philosophy the screen
reader will have? Many of the more minimalist ones like Narrator,
Gnopernicus or VoiceOver seem to be close to what I'd like. In brief, my
screen reading philosophy is that the screen reader should not change how
the computer is operated unless that's absolutely necessary. Most of the
things I'm listing on the page stem from this basic rule.

Finally, is it possible for a sight impaired person to do Longhorn
development? Surely you need an existing Longhorn screen reader if the SDk
must run under Longhorn, don't you? A bit of a chicken and egg problem, you
could say, a screen reader for developing a screen reader.

Another thing I'm worried about is Visual Studio 2003. The menu colors don't
conform to my high-contrast color scheme, which leaves sufficient contrast
between windows (fields) and dialogs without sacrificing readability, unlike
most
high-contrast schemes. More importantly, though, large parts of the program
including the property panel in the forms editor and the right side of many
dialogs seem to be totally inaccessible with Dolphin Supernova 6.51.

Any thoughts or comments appreciated as usual,

PS: I hope this is the list posting address. I haven't received a real welcome message just yet.

With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/ 

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