Hi Thomas,
Thank you very much for the information. I really never looked into it, but
was wondering. Thanks.
BFN
----- Original Message -----
Hi Jim,
No, it wouldn't. Older versions of Jaws worked differently than
current versions of Jaws. As of Jaws 8.0, I believe it was, Freedom
Scientific uses the Freedom Scientific API, FSAPI, for communicating
with Jaws which was not present in Jaws 7.x and earlier. Obviously, if
you were to add Jaws support you'd want to write your games using the
Freedom Scientific API which is what is used by every version of Jaws
from 8.0 on up. Unfortunately, for Jaws users such as yourself that
are using an old version of Jaws you'd have to upgrade or add extra
support for older versions of Jaws that wouldn't apply to new versions
of Jaws.
The situation with Window-Eyes isn't much different. With older
versions of Window-Eyes you could write a COM wrapper around
GWSpeak.dll, which still works, but for versions 7.0 and up GW Micro
has added supportthrough Window-Eyes scripting support to write
extentions to Window-Eyes that could act as a bridge between your game
and the screen reader.For backwards compatibility sake you could still
use the GWSpeak.dll, but as with everything else in life GW Micro has
changed their A)PI and who knows how long the old one will be around
for backwards compatibility sake.
As far as Supernova, formally Hal goes, there wasn't an API before
12.0 so obviously you can't support any version that doesn't even have
an API. You can't support something that didn't exist. :D
In short, your answer is no. There is no way to support every screen
reader and every version of every screen reader with any single API
because there are too many different versions of the APIs etc to deal
with. While Quentin's Universal Speech project is a good start to that
end he has rightly started with the most current and most commonly
used APIs for each screen reader he could find documentation for and
wrote a wrapper around it for easy access to that screen reader's API.
Unlike Sapi, where you are dealing with one single API, the Universal
Speech API attempts to wrap six or seven different screen reader APIs
and the only sane way to do that is to ignore any old our outdated
APIs that aren't likely to be used by many screen reader users. Plus
as was the case of Hal or Supernova it didn't even have an API prior
to 12.0 so older versions are an instant out just because of the
screen reader's lack of an API in the first place. Its for this reason
I haven't bothered with screen reader support myself. Its a big
headache.
Cheers!
Jim
Just waiting for a new version......
j...@kitchensinc.net
http://www.kitchensinc.net
(440) 286-6920
Chardon Ohio USA
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