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

Hi Matthew,
Ok agreed that my ideas might be too minimalist for general usage. But surely that doesn't mean I couldn't try them myself or make the prompting as brief and consise as possible in existing screen reading products. I've found that screen reading issues come a lot down to taste, too. Having started out with Supernova versions 3 and 4, it tought me a screen reading philosophy that's quite different from the current versions of Jaws or Supernova itself.

One classic example of what I consider to be sound use of the relative term "too different from how the sighted do it" is the Win 9X start button. In Win 98 none of the menu items gets the focus if you open up the Start Menu. Jaws used to highlight the first item with scripting and thus made the UI unnecessarily different from how it appears to the sighted keyboard user. Supernova doesn't alter this glich in Windows and I personally like this philosophy much better. It is reading the screen not idealizing and altering it.

Frankly speaking, I didn't really expect people to take my page as a list of acceptable feature suggestions or a generic direction of this project. I would be happy if even one or two ideas would be implemented over time. And I would be willing to put programming effort into something generally usable such as a good redundancy filter. None of the screen readers have one and the idea sounds good at least on paper. Take highly redundant path names in visual Studio 6 or reading three digit progress indicators totally, if in most cases only the last digit changes.

You still haven't answered any of the other questions, though. To rehash and re-phrase slightly:

a. Do I need Longhorn for Longhorn development and which version of Visual Studio is necessary? Parts of both Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 are highly inaccessible with Dolphin Supernova in particular the property pane in the forms designer doesn't speak anything. Visual Studio 6 is unsupported already but at least it works.

b. In which phase is this screen reader project currently and what ways of participating are there?

c. Does the reader include some sort of extension mechanism such as a plug-in interface?

Also a slight niggle about the terminology. It says on the intro page that this is a list for everyone so shouldn't people use common terms where ever possible? I came across some posting a few days back and didn't understand even half of it, even though I would consider myself a powre user and have read bits and pieces about usability and accessibility. So I'd say your average user is even more lost than I am <no offence ment to anyone>.


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

Matthew King wrote: 
Veli,

With all due respect, I think your "minimalist" ideas at:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/free_screen_reader.html
are too minimalist, not realistic,  and are counter productive.

For instance, rationalizing the exclusion of a feature because it is "too
different" from how a sighted person uses a computer seems baseless. The
same logic would say that using an audio interface to a visually oriented
system at all is "too different." The reality is that the very idea of a
screen reader, verses a computing platform designed from the ground-up as
an audio-interface computing platform, begs for accomodations to mitigate
the lack of efficiency inherent in bolt-on accessibility. Without such
mitigating accomodations, the audio-interface or tactile-interface user
will be left in the dust by his or her sighted peers.

Matt King
Accessibility End User Advocate
IBM Enterprise Services/Corporate Accessibility CoC
Phone: (719) 520-3006, Tie line: 8-656-3006
Internet: mattking@xxxxxxxxxx
IBM Internal Accessibility Tools:
http://w3.ibm.com/tools/it/ittools.nsf/main/pwd_PWDResources.htm
IBM Internal Accessibility Transformation Home:
http://w3.ibm.com/transform/cio.nsf/main/pwd_main.htm
IBM Accessibility Center: http://www.ibm.com/able




            Veli-Pekka Tätilä
            <vtatila@xxxxxxxx
            dent.oulu.fi>                                              To
            Sent by:                  <ossrp-control@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
            ossrp-control-bou                                          cc
            nce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
                                                                  Subject
                                      [ossrp-control] Member Intro,
            05/28/2005 07:54          Feature Suggestions and Questions
            AM


            Please respond to
              ossrp-control






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/

To post to the list, send a message to:
ossrp-control@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe, send a message to:
ossrp-control-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
and set the subject field of the message to "unsubscribe" (without the
quotes



To post to the list, send a message to:
ossrp-control@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe, send a message to:
ossrp-control-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
and set the subject field of the message to "unsubscribe" (without the
quotes 

To post to the list, send a message to:
ossrp-control@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe, send a message to:
ossrp-control-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
and set the subject field of the message to "unsubscribe" (without the quotes

Other related posts: