Re: The top three big problems

Maybe a small suggestion would be to download the demos of a few screen readers and get an idea of how they work, what hotkeys would conflict with what you have in mind. Also learning to use the computer the way a blind person will help to better understand what is needed. Two of the most common ones are at www.freedomscientific.com and www.gwmicro.com. I have found that when programming it is always best to test the software the way you are intending it to be used. It will save alot of bug reports in the long run. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Martin Slack" <m.g.slack@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2007 3:53 PM
Subject: Re: The top three big problems



Andy,
I think that the use of those hotkeys is almost universal, so there would be a constant reading of the list while one worked. For instance, most screenreaders seem to use the Control key on its own to silence speech, while Alt is the standard Windows key to access the menu bar at the top of the screen.
A better approach might be to allocate a single hotkey to toggle into focus a window containing the full list of hotkeys. 

 Regards, Martin
----- Original Message ----- From: "Andreas Stefik" <stefika@xxxxxxxxx> 
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2007 8:31 PM
Subject: Re: The top three big problems



So it sounds like from this further discussion on hotkeys that there
are several important things.

1. Try to copy hotkeys from a common program as best as possible. Most
folks have said they prefer the visual studio hotkeys. Easy enough.

2. Create some way so that a user can get a complete list of hotkeys.
I'm not sure exactly what the best way to do this would be for a full
featured IDE, but maybe there is some way you can adapt ideas like
intellisense to the application of hotkeys. I'm thinking, and I don't
know how hard this would be to add to my program per se, but here is
an idea. What about, and I'm just brainstorming here, something like
the following:

When the user presses a common hot key control (CTRL, ALT, or SHIFT),
the computer begins reading a list of the most common hotkeys for that
particular context sensitive shortcut. I'm speculating, maybe, that,
if you already know the shortcut you don't hear text because you click
the combination quickly, but if you don't know it, you can at least
listen to the list of the most common ones. Here is an example use
case (tell me if this sucks):

Use case:

User presses control and text begins to be read. The most common
commands are read first, like so:

control plus c, copy
control plus v, paste

etc.

I'm not sure what the best ordering of reading would be for each. Good
Idea / Bad idea / Better Idea?

3. All else being equal, making the hotkeys customizable is desirable.

Keep it coming, this is all very, very helpful.

Andy
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