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

Hi Pete,
I think that the interaction you're describing with sighted colleagues comes 
when a blind person wants help, and the sighted person, who is not a technical 
type, has no clue when the blind person starts talking 
about control types, e.g. radio buttons and the like, but may well say, find 
the red button in the upper left corner of the screen. And of course, the blind 
person has no idea. Or if a blind person is trying to help a 
sighted person who is new to a particular application, that sighted person wil 
not understand when the blind person starts giving nonvisual queues, such as 
find the link that says my start page, or whatever. My 
experience is that an awfullot of sighted people do a whole lot better when 
there is something visually oriented along with that text explanation, like 
where this link is or what color it is, if its different, or whatever. In 
the main, however, I agree with you, and I certainly think that, except for 
instances where there is an inherently visual element to the task itself, such 
as paint programs, that visual information, when it conveys 
semantic meaning, is not intuitive for blind people, and there should be 
alternative, more intuitive ways to convey that to us, rather than having us 
adjust to what is essentially a foreign modality. 
Mary

Mary

On Fri, 06 May 2005 00:54:38 -0400, Peter Parente wrote:

>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
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