[real-eyes] Fw: Google's web interfaces with screen readers
- From: "Terrie Arnold" <tanderson3@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <real-eyes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2007 17:07:28 -0500
----- Original Message -----
From: "BlindNews Mailing List" <BlindNews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <BlindNews@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2007 7:40 AM
Subject: Google's web interfaces with screen readers
> Blind Confidential (Blog)
> Thursday, September 13, 2007
>
> Google's web interfaces with screen readers
>
> By Chris Hofstader
>
> Since arriving in Massachusetts, I've had access to a wireless network but
> I do not have my father-in-law's password for what was his Comcast account
> and the huge ISP/Cable/Phone Company requires authentication to use its
> outgoing server and it doesn't permit anonymous rerouting to other SMTP
> servers. And, no, I cannot ask my father-in-law for his password as he
> died in March and hasn't spoken to me since.
>
> Ordinarily, I write Blind Confidential in MS Word and use the "Send" item
> under the File menu to email the post to blogger.com. Once the Blogger for
> Word button bar stopped working, I found that the email approach,
> described to me first by Jeff Bishop (link to his Desert Skies blog above)
> in a phone conversation a few months ago, suited my needs better than
> anything else I could find. I understand that Word 2007 has some kind of
> interface for people who write blogs that sends information directly to
> the host but I only have Office 2003 on the laptop I brought with me up
> north and cannot comment on how well it works with a screen reader.
>
> So, in order to stay in touch, post blog entries and communicate with
> people on my various research projects, I created a gmail account and also
> tried to use the blogger online interface. On this laptop, I have two
> Windows screen readers installed namely, JAWS and System Access so I
> cannot comment on HAL, Window-Eyes or any of the others.
>
> When one goes into the gmail page with JAWS, they quickly learn that they
> cannot use the site unless they click on the link that reads, "If you are
> using a screen reader, click here for basic html," or something very
> similar. With System Access one can start using the site and the dynamic
> content is updated properly, tables are recognized as such and the links
> that JAWS reports as plain text actually work.
>
> Even in the "basic html" interface, JAWS exhibits some peculiar problems.
> In the multi-line edit fields, when one tries to type a capital letter
> that is also one of the quick keys in the JAWS virtual buffer support, the
> leading screen reader announces that "This feature is only available when
> using the virtual buffer on the Internet." Oddly, this only happens the
> first time that any of the capital letters are typed in such an edit field
> per session. Thus, capital F, O, I, B and the other quick keys cause a
> temporary error when typing.
> This isn't an enormous problem unless, like me, you type very quickly and,
> when you review your message later, you find that some words are missing
> their initial letter. Still, this is more of an annoyance than anything
> else and I'd assume that it would be an easy bug to fix.
>
> Because I'm running Visual Studio a lot, I tend to also run JAWS as the
> scripts that Jamal Mazrui and the guys on the blind programming mailing
> list have written as a team, are so good that VS .Net works better with
> JAWS than any other screen reader/IDE combination out there that I have
> tried. [If you are interested in these scripts or any of Jamal's cool and
> highly accessible programs, go to his web site:
> http://www.empowermentzone.com or one of the other sites that provide ways
> to download this software.] I don't always feel like jumping from one
> screen reader to another just to read mail or send a
> quick response to someone so I have grown kind of accustomed to using JAWS
> with gmail although I would prefer the System Access level of support.
>
> The blogger interface also works better with System Access than with JAWS
> but it is not as smooth as the SA gmail support. Yesterday, as many of you
> noticed, my post "The RIM, RAM, SAM Scam" contained a bunch of garbage and
> two copies of the text I copied from MS Word and pasted into the blogger
> edit field. I don't know how or why this happened but, somehow, the text I
> copied from Word got combined with text in the JAWS virtual buffer and
> when I pasted it into the edit
> field, it looked pretty crappy. I did the blog post right as my wife and I
> were running out the door to visit an old friend in Jamaica Plain so I
> didn't review the post and, given my luck with web interfaces lately, it,
> of course, came out miserably.
>
> Generally, though, the screen readers I tried (more so in the JAWS case
> than SA) need to improve a bit before I would say that the gmail or
> blogger interfaces are truly usable. SA, as I state above, does an
> excellent job with gmail and performs adequately in blogger. JAWS requires
> that one use the blind guy ghetto "basic html" interface for gmail and
> works dreadfully in the blogger pages. I'm told that JAWS 9 is supposed to
> do revolutionary things on the Internet so I hope that when 9.0 is
> released, it does at least as well as System Access on pages built with
> AJAX that have a lot of dynamic content.
>
> Mike Calvo wrote an interesting post on the "Who's to Blame" topic on the
> Serotek blog yesterday (http://www.serotek.com/blog). I recommend that BC
> readers check it out as I think he provides a more comprehensive
> discussion of the issue than any of the other blogs I've read recently.
>
> I still think that ATIA, the industry association for access technology
> companies, should try to coordinate an effort to develop a document that
> web developers can use to better understand what AT users will see, hear
> or feel when on their web sites. The precise design of user experience
> should probably remain in the hands of the AT companies as features like
> Quick Keys and others are issues on which these companies compete and I,
> for one, want the screen reader vendors to continue to try to innovate in
> order to beat each other at
> the cash register. At the same time, though, I feel strongly that web
> developers should have a easy set of reference materials on which they can
> set expectations for how their pages will work with AT.
>
> Mike Davies, the actual author of the blog post I accidentally attributed
> to someone else last week, said in a comment he posted that he would not
> like to have different expectations for behavior in different screen
> readers and that he would also not like putting a "best if read with
> screen reader X" statement on a web page as this would be bad for
> standards and guidelines and would likely muddy the waters of web
> accessibility. I believe this sort of thing is
> inevitable whether the web sites state that they work better with one
> screen reader or another or leave such a statement off and let the users
> guess which AT might work best on which sites. I feel strongly that the AT
> companies should try to adhere to the user agent guidelines as closely as
> possible; sadly, though, I think that the leading screen reader vendors
> will do whatever best suits their business model rather than what best
> suits their users and rely on
> companies like google to provide a blind guy ghetto "basic html"
> alternative to all of the cool new dynamic content that people who do not
> depend on AT can enjoy.
>
> Afterward
>
> As the easiest thing I could find to fix the "RIM, RAM, SAM Scam" article
> was to delete it and repost the entire thing, I also deleted the comments
> posted before I put the corrected version up. Will Pearson and Chairman
> Mal had sent in interesting comments and, if they read this, I hope they
> will repost their comments as I found them entertaining but I don't think
> they were online long enough for many others to see them
>
> -- End
>
> posted by BlindChristian at 11:06 AM
>
>
> http://blindconfidential.blogspot.com/2007/09/googles-web-interfaces-with-screen.html
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