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

Hi Mary,

I think your comment about about needing the cooperation of software developers to change the way their visual interfaces are structured touches on some of the potential power of user interface automation technologies. Say, for instance, that a wizard turns out to be the most efficient way for a screen reader user to accomplish some task, but, unfortunately, the application GUI isn't structured like a wizard. Instead, it has a bunch of panes in the main program window that have to be filled in a certain order. Given that the screen reader can inspect and control all of these panes, what's to stop it from presenting them as a wizard to the user? Does the user really need to know that the steps he or she needs to take to complete their task is structured as a set of panes in some containing window? Probably not. So why not let the screen reader collect the necessary information from the user by acting as a wizard and let it do the menial work of entering it properly into the GUI?

Now, this doesn't mean that there isn't some human work involved here. Someone still needs to tell the screen reader (e.g. through a script) that the window panes should be re-structured into an audio wizard. But at least this approach affords the possibility of improving the usability of an application without being totally dependent on the original software developer. Some third-party could write the script.

At present, though, the scripting languages available for screen readers and the interface automation technologies do not make this type of abstraction easy, but it is possible. Improving the ease with which an application can be scripted to provide alternative representations of program tasks in audio is one of my goals in building Clique.

Regards,
Pete
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