Re: Auditory interface ideas, what would help?

  • From: "Alex Hall" <mehgcap@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:16:53 -0400

Changing the pitch of the poice as you read is good for an error on that line, 
then just have a keystroke that speaks the error's text (description). The only 
problem I see is that, for some reason, jaws sometimes switches to a lower 
voice (its "jaws cursor" voice) when you do a lot of things very fast, so there 
may be confusion between whether you just typed a lot and then arrowed around, 
causing jaws to switch to the lower voice, or whether the line actually has an 
error. I know you said that the word "error" would be spoken at the end of the 
line, but listening to the entire line just to confirm whether it is an error 
or not gets old after a while. I think that a very short sound, maybe just a 
chord of tones for 50ms or something before the line is spoken, would do it; 
make the cord tense, like a minor or 7 (they sound tense to me anyway) so that 
it is obvious that this line has an error. The biggest thing is to NOT change 
focus to, say, an error list or a list of suggested items as you type. 
Something that may work is, instead of having a keystroke for a suggestions 
list, just use a modifier key held down for one second. I know it does not 
sound much different, but, personally, I would rather have to just press a 
single key, like shift, for a second than to have to move my hands to press 
ctrl-shft-s or some other combo. Others may feel differently, but there you 
have my two cents on that. Oh, before I forget: the very short sound that 
indicates an error in the current line when you review your code could be 
played when you hit the return key or spacebar (any whitespace, unless it is in 
the middle of a function or class declaration or any other case that requires 
spaces); that tells me that there is an error in the word or line I just typed. 
Pressing a keystroke, or holding down a modifier key, would make jaws speak the 
text of the error. Possibly caps lock could be used as one such key. Of course, 
exceptions to this would be if, say, I spelled "import" or "function" wrong, in 
which case the spacebar or tab should be used to alert me; do not wait until I 
type out the entire function declaration and hit return to tell me that I 
spelled "function" worng.
Anyway, that was mostly things I thought of as I wrote, or things I have 
considered when programming in other languages. This semester in college, one 
of my classes will be doing a lot of java, so I am willing to test this 
program. Thanks!


Have a great day,
Alex
New email address: mehgcap@xxxxxxxxx
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Andreas Stefik 
  To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
  Sent: Friday, August 28, 2009 3:40 PM
  Subject: Re: Auditory interface ideas, what would help?


  Alex,

  we were considering changing the prosody (voice inflection), when you browse 
to a line that has an error. For example, the voice might get "deeper" when you 
are on a line with an error, then at the end of the sound might say, "Error: " 
then give you the name of the error. What do you think about that kind of clue?

  This wouldn't give you details on an error that's not on the same line 
though. I was thinking that trying to represent that might get overwhelming. 
What do you think? Any ideas for how you could represent that without 
overwhelming the person with info (e.g., multiple errors on multiple lines)?

  -- 
  Andreas Stefik, Ph.D.
  Department of Computer Science
  Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

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