[ossrp-control] Re: Semi OT: Scriptability: Start Menu Highlighting (Was: Member Intro, Feature Suggestions and Questions)

Hi Jamal,
I can see your point regarding whether to auto-highlight the first item in the Start Menu with a screen reader. I'd say this does come to taste and personally not doing these little convenience things automatically is one reason why I prefer Supernoava to Jaws. Another point is that you can take this same idealization scheme a bit further and start reformatting HTML pages by the screen reader. This is another thing I greatly dislike and for the same reason. IT is giving you a manipulated picture of screen contents without even telling that it does so. Having a browser feature or plug-in for HTML reformatting is fine by me, because that's an application feature and not a screen reader specific quirk.

Apart from taste issues I do have one rational argument against the Start Menu auto-highlight and many other similar features:

There will always be simple screen readers that don't have these convenience features at all. Or even worse, screen readers implementing these features slightly differently. This means that the Windows fundamentals vary from screen reader to screen reader and the user has to cope with that.

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

Jamal Mazrui wrote: 
As acknowledged this is partly a matter of taste, but I personally am
glad that JAWS automatically highlights and reads the first option of the
Windows Start Menu.  Most application menus automatically highlight the
first option when activated, so this is not peculiar behavior.  It has an
efficiency benefit of giving a bit more information about the menu just
opened, but not too much to be verbose.  Hearing the first menu option is
additional, relevant information about the context of current choices
available, and if one wants the first menu option, one can just press
Enter, thus saving an extra down arrow keystroke.

I do not think we should be such purists that we necessarily immitate the
visual interface, even its oddities, through sound.  If there are ways
the screen reader can make the computing environment more productive for
us as blind users, without losing some other significant feature, then
why not?  We have enough obstacles to contend with in a GUI environment
that it should be respectable if not desirable to improve it for
ourselves when feasible.

Jamal 

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