Re: Sodbeans 0.5 Release in Early July
- From: Andreas Stefik <stefika@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Jamal Mazrui <empower@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:59:07 -0500
Jamal,
Thanks on the SayTools material. We've been wanting to add in windows
eyes support, pulling support from say tools, but haven't had a chance
to add it yet. We also have mac support, so if you want to add that
into say tools from our implementation, feel free. Actually, I was
wondering, have you figured out any way to get the screen readers to
inform you when text is finished speaking or when the screen reader
decided to start speaking something else on its own?
As for user interfaces, we won't have UI support before this release.
However, we just finished a way to make native calls down to Java or
C++ from Hop, and as such, creating an API for user interfaces is
definitely possible. If cooking up an API for that sort of thing
interests you at all, I certainly wouldn't complain.
Stefik
On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 8:15 AM, Jamal Mazrui <empower@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Congrats, Andreas, on the pprogress your team has made!
>
> Let me make sure you are aware that SayTools includes code for speaking
> through the APIs of Window-Eyes and System Access.
>
> One question I have is whether it is currently possible to create graphical
> user interfaces with Sodbeans. Sorry if that has been explained already.
>
> Jamal
>
>
> On 6/13/2010 4:10 PM, Andreas Stefik wrote:
>>
>> Hey folks,
>>
>> I know some of the folks on the list (e.g., Sina, Jamal, Louie Most),
>> have been involved in the Sodbeans project, which my team and I are
>> designing as a prototype to show how to make programming languages and
>> development environments easier to use for blind users. My team, which
>> is both at southern Illinois university edwardsville, and washington
>> state university, has made significant progress, and a working, alpha,
>> build of our tool is nearly ready for release. As I've been working to
>> develop this technology now for almost five years, I can't tell you
>> how personally excited I am to get the software finally out there.
>>
>> It looks like our final feature set for this first release is going to
>> include the following:
>>
>> 1. Talking debugger, which aurally tells the user what is happening as
>> you debug. For example, our debugger might tell you the values of
>> variables as they change, whether you have called a function, created
>> an object, or done other actions.
>>
>> 2. Talking compiler, which tells you whether there are compiler
>> errors, and summarizes aurally the problems, if any, in the source
>> code.
>>
>> 3. A custom programming language called Hop. Hop is a fully
>> functioning programming language that we've designed in formal
>> experiments where we watch people program using audio only
>> environments. Besides typical features you would expect in a modern
>> language (e.g., control structures, objects), in Hop, accessibility is
>> a first class citizen. To give you an example of how HOP can help
>> blind users, if you wanted to write a computer program to make your
>> screen reader speak in C++ or Java, it's time consuming and you need
>> some expertise on how to connect to various screen reader
>> architectures. In Hop, you can connect to any arbitrary screen reader
>> the user has loaded by saying:
>>
>> say "How's it going, screen reader?"
>>
>> and you will hear the TTS routed appropriately. Right now we support
>> JAWS, NVDA, SAPI, and Mac out of the box and we're working on adding
>> more readers as we go.
>>
>> 4. Full integration into Oracle's NetBeans IDE. The accessibility
>> support in Sodbeans is built on the Sappy platform, which is built on
>> the NetBeans platform. We have fixed an enormous number of
>> accessibility problems and bugs since our Sappy 0.5.3 release and have
>> added NVDA support (Thanks, Sina!).
>>
>> So, that's what we've been working on. After we release, we would love
>> to get the community even more involved. We welcome contributions to
>> the standard library in Hop, like classes for data structures, more
>> screen reader support, or other features. We would also love to get
>> feedback on how we can improve the user interface for the blind or
>> even get just general opinions on where the research should go.
>>
>> Thanks for listening everyone,
>>
>> Andreas Stefik, Ph.D.
>> Department of Computer Science
>> Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
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>> View the list's information and change your settings at
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