[ossrp-control] Re: What Is A Screen Reader?

Hi Laura,

It's interesting to hear that you find drag and drop easy in audio. If it works well for you, that's great.

All I'm suggesting is that there may be a better way to achieve the same effect as drag and drop in audio. As far as I know (and correct me someone if I'm wrong) nobody has really looked into the alternatives. Drag and drop was "invented" for visual displays. Is there an equivalent or more powerful metaphor for audio?

What if you have to go to work at a new company and are unfamiliar with where the icons are located on the desktop. The first time you use drag and drop, you have to explore their spatial relationships. But why should you need to do that? All you really want to do is be able to associate one object with another and not worry about switching cursors and moving them in certain directions. Perhaps there's a way to easy the learning.

There is also room for improvement from an information theory point of view. The key presses needed to switch cursor modes and the time needed to move one object to another are not critical to the task of associating object and action. By eliminating them, or reducing the time it takes to perform them, you'd have a better interface, purely from an efficiency standpoint.

Pete

Laura Eaves wrote:

I don't know what the difficulty is with drag and drop -- actually it is not hard to do this with jaws -- just switch to the jaws or mouse cursor and lock it and then navigate over to the destination and unlock and the object is deposited. I have done it many times.

But as for spatial relationships, i am wondering if there would be an easy way to specify relative location on the screen audibly -- such as having the screen reader put an invisible grid on the screen and give grid coordinates of an object.
Having come from having partial vision to having almost none, I for one miss seeing spatial relationships. I think it would be a plus for the user if some kind of spatial info were given by the screen reader to the user.
Obviously for many apps it is not important to know spatial layout -- and indeed when i learned windows with jaws (at the same time) 6 years ago, I had no idea where anything was spatially and wished I had.
And spatial relationship is not purely a visual attribute -- it is also tactile -- and in fact I sometimes find myself moving my hands around to get an idea of what I am doing when on the computer or solving a math problem (math was my major in college) and indeed my vision even when I could read was limited to a very small field so I only saw a small part of what I was doing. But that didn't mean I couldn't "visualize" it in my mind.

If the spatial info were supplied somehow by a screen reader I think more people would use it and soon find it very useful, if not essential. I am aware that persons who have been blind all their lives have the feeling that since they have never needed it it somehow isn't necessary. Well, of course they can live without it, but if the info is available I think they would indeed like it!

Just some thoughts.  Feel free to shoot holes in my conjectures.
--le


----- Original Message ----- From: <bryan_dufelmeier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ossrp-control@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, May 04, 2005 5:39 PM
Subject: [ossrp-control] Re: What Is A Screen Reader?






Well sometimes mapping these relationships would work quite well and other
times not at all.  Drag and drop is a good examaple of when not to use this
approach.  The progblem there is that mapping an action while it's being
performed is simply too much information for the average user to process
without an unduly amount of practice.  However, I remember having a program
several years ago in dos when I was using the versabraille.  Now the
program used something called exploding windows which was an effect
visually created when a new window was opened.  The versabraille is not an
audio device but you could hear when a new window opened because the
braille dots zipped across the screen in an obvious way.  The effect was
tactile if your hands happened to be in position as well.  Audio effects
and icons could be very useful in conveying all sorts of information.
Sometimes spoken clues and explantions will be necessary and sometimes as
with drag and drop the action itself would be made more difficult by going
overboard on the audio.  Doing an audio mapping for drag and drop may be
useful in a tutorial about windows for explaiing the concept but not in
actual screen reader operation.  Just some comments for the road.

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