Hi Alastair and all,
AC: My experience is very biased towards web development rather than
(OS based) application development, but a couple of points come to mind.
dp: <smile> This is a good perspective.
AC: 1. VO is *much* better when a mouse is in use than the main
Windows equivalents.....
JAWs is totally designed around just using the keyboard, which for
it's target audience is fair enough.
dp: that remains to be seen given that we now have VO for the same
audience.
AC: OSX doesn't have full keyboard access without VO).
dp: please explain?
AC: 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),
dp: I like relative motion and did notice that there are some places
where we move differently depending on the keys we use. I only wish
we had more of that such as on the web orr in airport setup.
AC: 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.
dp: this is a consern of mine as well and I was hoping it wouldn't
matter. I don't think even though it's frree, that many will put in
the effort to learn VO just to develop for it.
AC: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.
dp: can you put the uri in the message? I don't understand this
vehavior either. On the web, it does not matter what I use, I still
go liniarly it seems. In other words, for me, the columns seem
stacked. I'd like to read across if I use left and right and
vertically if I use up and down assuming of course that there is
value for this on the page in question.
AC: I'm not sure what the specific question was, but I hope that helps?
Cheers,
dp: It's a subset of what I was looking for but a good starting point
and valuuable insight.
Thanks!
-Alastair
