Hi Will, That strikes me as a very clear definition of what the screen reader should be doing. Obviously people have very different ways of working, even if they have the same level of site or lack of it, depending on whether they think more or less "visually" or perhaps spatially would-be a better term. I know both in mobility and in handling documents I need to have a "map" of where things are relative to each other. This may not be totally accurate, but its existence, once it has been derived from experience increases efficiency and confidence in handling movement, whether in the real world of three dimensions or within the data world. I can remember more easily "where" things are. The lack of colour cues is probably a disadvantage too in terms of speed of reaction to the screen, or I suppose I mean the computer'sactivities, but is there a way of compensating for the greater information handling capacity and speed of vision chanels? Ed -----Original Message----- From: ossrp-control-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ossrp-control-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Will Pearson Sent: 01 May 2005 02:59 To: ossrp-control@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; uvip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [ossrp-control] What Is A Screen Reader? Hi, I thought I'd share my, rather academic, view of what a screen reader is. It offers a little glimmer into what screen readers could potentially do, and some of the pitfalls that the current crop of screen readers have fallen into. All this is from the viewpoint of human computer interaction, psychology and communications theory. OK. So, what is a screen reader? Well, it's actually a lot more than people often assume it is. It's not just something that grabs the text from the screen and reads it to you, well, at least it shouldn't be, it is in fact the interface by which user and machine communicate semantic meaning, relating to thoughts, concepts, actions and states. So, how did I arrive at this view? As some of you may know, I've been researching into semantics and their role in software interfaces for a while now. During this time, it's become apparent that software interfaces are just intended to communicate semantic meaning, but as we're not capable of extr sensory perception and telepathy with the computer, we need some way to indicate our thoughts, concepts, actions, etc. to the computer, and vice versa. The way this is visually done is by placing elements on the screen, such as icons, buttons, etc. and having their shape, colour, position on screen and relationships to one another act as encoding channels by which the semantic meaning is conveyed. Users then just point to an object, conveying the semantics of which element they would like to interact with, and either click it or select an action to perform on it from a menu. All this is just a form of physical encoding of the semantic meaning between user and machine and vice versa. So, as a screen reader is a replacement for the visual interface, it's role is simply to act as an interface between user and machine and convey the semantic meaning generated by the machine. However, there's a nasty twist, and that is that a screen reader has to get the semantic meaning that it is to communicate to the user from somewhere. As the screen reader has no access to the internals of the machine, it's only available source of semantics that the machine wishes to convey is the visual interface, which uses encoding techniques such as colour, shape, position and spatial relationship to convey it's semantics. So, a screen reader should really be about extracting the semantics from the visual display and encoding them in a non-visual form suitable for a blind user, and this is where current screen readers fall down. To maintain accurate and efficient communication with the user, all the semantics that are conveyed visually need to be conveyed to the user. This includes things like spatial positioning and spatial relationships between interface elements, things that are currently lost to the user when they are using one of the current screen readers. If this were to happen, then the number of errors, and according back-tracks and reissuing of commands that go along with errors, would decrease, and screen reader users would be more efficient beasts. I haven't gone into design specifics, as they're for another day, and these can dramatically affect efficiency as well, but that's my thoughts of what a screen reader should be doing. In focusing on the semantics, then it's likely that through the use of semantic translation access to all those difficult accessibility problems could be increased. Will