David Poehlman wrote:
I'm calling out to those Mac Folk who are not blind who use VO for one reason or another.
Hello :)
What I want to look at here is how easy it can be to test development work with VO. Are you prone to turn VO on and point and click? If so, would this be enough?
My experience is very biased towards web development rather than (OS based) application development, but a couple of points come to mind.
1. VO is *much* better when a mouse is in use than the main Windows equivalents. For example, if you use a mouse to click around when JAWs is running, it gets confusing fast. Also, when browsing a web page with JAWs, it often scrolls the page down so that you can't see where the focus is.
JAWs is totally designed around just using the keyboard, which for it's target audience is fair enough. For someone just testing with JAWs it means that you have to learn the keyboard commands quickly (although the basic ones match standard Windows ones, OSX doesn't have full keyboard access without VO).
2. VO appears to be designed around utilising the graphical interface. By that, I mean you actually move around in 2 dimensions. For example, the System Preferences is several rows of icons, and you can move left, right, up, and down. That was confusing coming from using a Windows based screen reader, where everything is linearised.
It is easier for the sighted person using the keyboard (or mouse), but it worries me that sighted people testing applications will use the application in quite a different way from people who can't see the screen.
Another thing I've noticed that seems to be as a result of this method is that some web pages don't make sense when read. For example, my home page (alastairc.ac) is two columns, and using VO-down to read, it goes across columns, rather than reading down through each one.
I've been meaning to put some test case together to try and work out what's going on, but haven't had a chance yet.
I'm not sure what the specific question was, but I hope that helps? Cheers, -Alastair
