Hi Dark,
Well, yes and no. Certainly I think UI Automation, the improved Sapi
voices, improved speech recognition in the Windows 8 consumor beta are
good things However, the new user interface is so radically different
from XP, Vista, Windows 7, etc that a lot of blind Windows users,
especially those who like XP, are going to absolutely hate Windows 8
because of the new interface even though Microsoft is working hard to
provide equal access to the OS and its pretty accessible out of the box
already.
For example, the start menu as you know it is totally gone. Instead when
you log into Windows 8 you land on a start menu with program groupes
tiled in columns across the screen. This is perfectly fine for a mouse
user who can point to the program group and click on it, but if you have
to figure out what row and column a program is in it can be a bit of a
pain access wise as there is no list view or tree view structure as in
prior versions of Windows. When looking at files folders, etc in
explorer they are also tiled the same way and its going to take blind
users a while to get use to looking for things since they are arranged
in a table like view rather than a vertical list.
Plus a lot of things in Windows 8 just don't work the way they did in
Win 7 and earlier. In XP if you press the context key you get a vertical
list of menu options like Open, Save, Print, etc. Under Windows 8 if you
press the context key you get a context screen with options tiled from
left to right. Instead of using up and down arrow you have to scroll
left and right with the left and right arrow keys. The first time I saw
that it threw me for a loop, because I wasn't expecting things to change
so radically.
Finally, ribbons are a standard part of the Windows interface, and
despite talk of Microsoft removing them I sincerely doubt it. Almost all
the programs in Windows 8 have ribbons instead of menus. Windows
Explorer, Internet Explorer, Wordpad, Windows Mail, Windows Media
player, you name it all have ribbons. If you hate ribbons then you
aren't going to like Windows 8 at all from a user interface perspective.
However, that said if you are interested in an overview of what's
changed I highly recommend you listen to a demonstration done by GW Micro
http://www.gwmicro.com
at this years convention. I think it will give you and everyone an idea
of what Windows 8 has in store for us both good and bad. The link to the
podcast is right on the main page.
Cheers!
On 3/14/2012 4:20 AM, dark wrote:
Hi Tom.
it might actually be then that microsoft are doing right in win8 what
they missed in win7? sinse certainly I've not heard these things about
win7.
Whether however they continue with support for these changes and if
they appear in none beta win 8 (I mean, I heard win7 was supposed to
feature more of narrator), we'll see, though as I said this might well
mean that I'll end up skipping from xp to win8 completely.
We'll just have to see where it ends up and if these things actually
happen or not.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
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