Hi dark.
The main difference here is that winboard is free and open source and anyone can add to it if they wish. Smugglers 3 is soled and the maker actually loses money if they don't support enough screen readers. I'm sure the developer appreciates if people use their product, but I'm sure couldn't care less for demands of support for x, y and z. They already coded in the features that they wanted in winboard. Here the focus was on adding support for playing against many advanced chess engines, instead of mucking around with screen reader API's which wouldn't really add any functionality for a jaws user.

I agree that jaws can not be considered universally accessible, simply because a license costs hundreds of dollars. On the other hand supporting a free solution like sapi or even supporting a screen reader like nvda would minimize the barriers to playing. Though you can always argue that (e.g) with sapi there is also not universal access, because of the issue with installing sapi voices on a 64 bit windows 7 system or because someone didn't like the options availible to them to use as speech output.
On 8/15/2011 2:30 PM, dark wrote:
Hmmm dave, there has been neither collusion nor is intended (certainly on my part), any hostility.

I merely wished myself to make the point that you cannot instantly equate jaws with total access for every visually impared person, and because of that other screen readers or sapi might be incorporated into the program, which I'm sure is extremely good.

when I was testing the access features introduced in Neilsbauer's space stratogy game smugglers 4, for various complex reasons the initial release only worked with hal and not jaws.

Had I said "well it works with Hal, so doesn't need anything else" I'm pretty sure people would've told me exactly the same thing.

It's not a question of collusion or any sort of cryticism against jaws generally, merely an observation of the fact that not everyone uses jaws, so assuming jaws = universal access is not necessarily a wise thing.

Imagine for instance that I wrote an accessible game of Risk which I only produced on Mack. If I claimed "this is universally accessible to everyone!" I'd obviously be wrong, sinse not every blind person owns a mac, and obviously the first question people would ask is "where is the pc version"


there is really litle need for such emotion about this question.

Beware the grue!

Dark.

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