this sounds very interesting, has anyone managed to register with Gmail
independently? I tried this the other day and encountered the dreaded
characters in a picture and haven't found anyone to help with this yet.
Takes a while to catch hubby doing nothing special and in a good mood these
days...
any tips about what to do to be able to read the characters myself would be
appreciated
Marie
----- Original Message -----
From: "Vanja Sudar" <vanja@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, September 05, 2005 9:00 PM
Subject: [access-uk] A review of google talk instant messeging program
Hi everyone. Thought some of you might be interested in this review of
google talk I found on another list. Google talk is a new I-M program made,
obviously, by google. Note: in order to use this, you have to have a GMail
account.
Hi, all. I've just finished playing with the google talk beta, and thought some people here who have Gmail accounts might be interested in trying it out. First, the good points. The program is simple to the point of austerity. There is no advertising whatever on the screen, and it's not cluttered at all. The voice quality is very good, even to me, and I've been using Skype, the quality of which is quite good, for quite a while. I was talking to someone who was on a dial-up connection earlier today. We started on Skype and switched to Google. The quality on Google was notably better for me, and he said the same. Google had no trouble negotiating my UPNP-enabled home router, and the connection did not drop once in about 80 minutes of conversation.
Now, the bad points, and all have to do with accessibility. My thanks to Amir Soleimani for his testing and help. Unfortunately, I was not able to test this with Window Eyes. First, if you're going to use the program, you're going to have to use the Jaws cursor. There are, to the best of my knowledge, very few keyboard shortcuts, and those aren't documented. If anyone has any links to documentation for keyboard shortcuts, I'd love to hear of it. Having said that, the Jaws cursor works quite well. The buttons are generally self-explanatory. At the top of the window, there is the title, "google talk". On some systems, there are two graphics to the right of this on the same line. These are minimize and exit, in that order from the left. Of course, one can use windows+m in the usual way. It and alt+f4 will send the program to the system tray, and it can be wholly killed from there through right-clicking on it if desired. Under that title line, one finds three options. Inbox, settings, help. They're in that order, and they're announced by Jaws. Clicking on them with the jaws cursor will activate them. The inbox is the standard Gmail inbox. The settings are in an accessible multi-page dialogue usable in the usual way (except for the block contacts list which I don't seem to be able to use though, to be fair, I haven't really tried much). The help is displayed in a standard web browser window.
Under these three options is the user's own name and status. Under that is a graphic and an edit box which can be used, though not very accessibly by me, to search one's contacts. Under that search box is a list of the friends that one has added to the messenger. A word on terminology. Contacts are all the addresses in your Gmail, and possibly in your Outlook and Windows, address book. Friends are those you've explicitly added to Google Talk as people you want to talk to or send instant messages to.
You will, at this point, have no friends in the list. Therefore, you will get to the bottom of the window and hear "add a friend". Clicking this will result in an accessible dialogue box which you can tab through to add someone. You can get the address from contacts or just enter it directly. Hit next and you'll get an accessible message about their being added or not. Note that only Gmail users can talk to Gmail users, but Gmail accounts are free. Hit finish and your friend should be added.
Now, you should have a list of at least one person on the screen. Note that, like most other messengers, the person must authorize you, so his/her status will show as "invited" or some variant until he/she gets google talk or, if it's already installed, until he/she authorizes you (through another accessible dialogue). Finding out if a friend is online is a headache. To do so, put your cursor on the friend's name and stay there for a second or two. Down arrow once and you should hear your friend's email address. Down arrow once again and you should hear the friend's status, whether available, offline, or something else. Note that, after you do this, you may find your jaws cursor stuck in your friend's info. Simply route jaws to PC and hit page up or page down to get loose and you can range the screen once again. If this method of determining who's online is a pain, you can, from the settings box, check a box to "hide all offline friends". This is much simpler. Note that you can remove a friend by right-clicking on the name and hitting "remove" from the resulting menu.
To call a friend, click his/her name once with your mouse cursor. This will open a box in which you can type an instant message. Instant messages can be read in one of two ways. They can be read with the Jaws cursor or, and this is easier, with the normal PC cursor. To read the messages with the PC cursor, you need to single left click on the text of any message. This puts the cursor into a normal read-only edit box from which you can read a history of messages. When it's time to type another message, just start typing. The cursor will automatically move to the edit box where messages are typed before sending. To send, press enter. Note that a press of backspace will also bring you from the edit box with the history of messages into the edit box for typing messages. Also note that most symbols will not. That is, when you're in the history read-only edit and type ".", you'll still be in the history edit box. When, however, you type "a" or press the backspace key, you'll be taken to the edit box where you type your messages.
To move on, at the top of the instant message window, just below the title line, are the mail and call buttons. These are self-explanatory. Hitting mail, the keyboard shortcut for which is F9, will bring you to a Gmail compose page ready for a message. Hitting call, the shortcut for which is f11, will result in ringing and, once your friend picks up, you can talk as usual into your mic. In the call window, once a call has been initiated, there is a "end call" and "mute" button. The keyboard shortcut for end call seems to be f12, and you can use that same shortcut if you place a call, your friend hasn't answered, and you want to stop ringing his line. Again, these buttons do what they say. Note that the only change I can see when the mute button is on is that it changes colour. That is, when your microphone is unmuted, the colour is reported by Jaws as "midnight blue on black". When the microphone is muted, the colour is reported as "orange 3 on black". The mute button is a toggle, hit it once to mute, again to unmute. To answer a call, click the answer button when the call notification comes up. There's also an ignore button.
Let me say that I think I've made this sound too complicated. It took me about ten minutes with the program and some help from a friend, to get the hang of most of its functions, which process was very much quickened by its simplicity. Of course, Google has a lot of improving to do, but much of this is relatively standard (put the contacts in a list, put in some more keyboard shortcuts, put the messages in an edit field). Other than that, Google's product is very usable, though not easily accessed. The audio quality is impressive, and that makes up for a lot.
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