I aggree tom.
On that note and before this topic gets old as it will do sooner or
later, and going completely off topic for a second, I have a rather
largeish concern with the metro system.
gwmicro was doing a podcast on windoweyes on win8 and it looked like
one of the most unwieldy interfaces in existance.
Sure its ok for the general public, but for us its really just a pain
in the guts.
I can't see anything good coming of this.
I know its still a consumer preview, but still the new system is
quite scary and complex.
While I did a search on how one would turn it off I found a blog
post/ ms forum.
about 3 people liked it but the rest didn't.
If ms is making a bad choice, win8 could become another vista.
All the updates don't mean much for us.
I am only just getting to like 7 and now I hear support drops for it
in 2015 of all things with end of life at 2020.
Aparently every os after this one will be metroised, which probably
means windows9 will be better being the second adition, ribbons I can
live with.
Upgrading the programs I can live with, but all this metro stuff.
I have heard descussions on how touchpads get in the way of users on here.
I have had to do tablet boxes, and had to resort to an external board
as the pads just got in the way.
If we can actually use the pads like the iphone or android devices I
wouldn't mind, however, I just hope classic shell or something comes
out to put the old way in for us at least.
At 06:30 a.m. 15/03/2012 -0400, you wrote:
Hi Shaun,
Well, I agree that something like UI Automation is way over do, but
it doesn't do any good to spend time on should've, could've, or
would'ive because the fact of the matter is the technology is here
now and we should be glad its coming. Plus you must remember that
these are different times, new laws, etc have came into effect since
all that old stuff was created.
For example, MSAA was first introduced for Windows 95 in the mid
90's and became a standard feature of Windows 98. From what I've
seen in programming accessibility was primarily bolted on to the OS
as an after thought and screen reader developers had to come up with
mirror drivers, scripts, etc to make up for the lack of
accessibility in applications.
However, in 2001 the ADA was amended with section 508 which makes it
mandatory that all software purchased by and used by the U.S.
government must be accessible to people with physical disabilities.
That law pretty much got the software industry moving on access and
why Apple, Microsoft, and Linux developers have been devoting more
and more time to improving the accessibility of their operating
systems. Even operating systems such as FreeBSD are reasonably
accessible with the Gnome desktop and Orca which wasn't the case up
until a few years ago.
Bottom line, asking why Microsoft did or didn't do this or that
earlier is a waist of time. I think the simplest answer is they were
not interested in developing a better solution until Section 508
made it mandatory that they do so in order to have their software
used by the U.S. government. Plus Microsoft is the leader in
software for the PC, and it would be rather ironic if they fell
behind Apple or an upstart like Linux in terms of accessibility,
because both Apple's Cocoa and Linux's at-spi technology centralize
accessibility through a single API which is what Microsoft is
attempting to do now as well.
Cheers!
On 3/14/2012 5:46 PM, shaun everiss wrote:
well it looks at least from the gwmicro win8 podcast that ms is
intigrating all this internally for screen readers which in my view
should have done already!!
Msaa was ok but it only did ms spaciffic controls as far as I understand it.
Sapi was speech, intercepters were needed so the readers could get
data from the graphics card, text and other junk piped to them,
though I don't know the full story.
The mirror driver was to make that so it didn't mangle things when
chains were broken.
Ms is doing the right thing by intigrating this into the os.
However, after getting reader manufacturers to use and or make
multipul libraries, its just a stupid waste of time.
Now we need to fix things so we can get access to the system, that
should have been there in the first place.
It will probably be easier to fix being only 1 set of libs now, but
because we worked with several we have to port which is a real nucence.
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