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

Hi Mary,

Yes. I see scripting as the "poor man's" way of injecting some intelligence into the screen reader. I think, with some work, it could be eliminated. The killer application, to me, would be a screen reader that starts off "dumb" just tells you everything that's on the screen. But, over time, it would learn what tasks you perform frequently, how you accomplish them, and then begin to automate some of the work for you. After some use, the screen reader would be more conversant about the things you do all the time but could still fall back on screen reading when new situations are encountered.

Clique won't be anywhere near that smart, at least not in the near future. But, to answer your question, it should support version changes better than other programs. Because Clique's scripts are written in terms of tasks, not visual components, they should be pretty stable across upgrades and, more interestingly, across applications of the same genre (e.g. two email clients might use the same or very similar scripts).

I've heard that same argument about telling the blind user about everything on the screen in order to ease interaction with sighted colleagues. I don't buy it. When two sighted users collaborate, I don't think they say things like "Open the file menu. Click the third item labeled Open. Wait for the window to appear. Click the text box below the file list. Type readme.txt." That's way too low level unless one or both are novice users. A piece of a more realistic dialog might resemble "Open the file readme.txt from the file menu." There's no need to know how the GUI is laid out in order to understand that statement as long how to open a file is clear.

Pete
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

Other related posts: