Hello there, As to your rational argument ... I'm afraid I see no reason in it. Are you stating that we should not do something because someone else might not do it, and therefore, we are thinking of the user? I don't agree with this at all ... We should do 500 things that some other screenreader doesn't do, because they do not do it, but more importantly: we should do them 100% correctly. And by the way ... If you really want to get minimalist: let's get minimalist. Some blind user is going to need to actually get real work done, rather than care what the designers of his assistive technology thought about the myriad philosophies of software engineering. The only way he's going to get his job done affectively, is if he can do it as quickly as possible ... If that means automatically highlighting the first menu item, then so be it. We are here to provide access, but to do it nicely. Jaws performs a million and one hacks to do the things it does ... It then performs ten thousand more hacks to do whatever ... But at the end of the day: jaws provides a great deal of access to a computer. It does a lot of things wrong ... It breaks every single possible software engineering principal about good programming, good practices, or good whatever. The company has a trillion things wrong with every facit of any possible sense of customer service or good business practices ... But it does allow me to write this email write now, and so there is something to be said for the fine line between what a screenreader should do, and what a purest theory dictates that a screenreader should do. Again, my own humble thoughts: no more, no less. Take care, Sina -----Original Message----- From: ossrp-control-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ossrp-control-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Veli-Pekka Tätilä Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2005 4:20 PM To: ossrp-control@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [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 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