Brian: “No one, prior to yourself, in this specific thread has indicated that anything I've mentioned is "something I can't get to," or I would have paused and tried to figure out how to remove that obstacle, if possible.”
Actually, Brian, that’s exactly what I told you. I’m grateful that Brad clarified this difficulty in communication. It is curious that your first response to, “Sorry, Brian, but that's a sighted response,” was indignation. Something to ponder, perhaps. From: Brian Vogel [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, January 29, 2016 10:31 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: How to have PDF files read in the Acrobat window and not Chrome On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 05:59 pm, Brad Martin <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Sorry, Brian, but that's a sighted response. We don't often have good luck with "pop-up menus" and "file icons." If we're lucky we might hear JAWS read them, but it's less common that we can get there from here and actually do something with them. If you know of some sort of keyboard command that can get us to where those notifications go, awesome. And I'll confess right now that I haven't read the rest of the day's mail yet. I just got home. Brad, My initial response when I read this was indignation and I was all prepared to go into high dudgeon about "how unfair" your opening line was. After spending about 20 minutes folding laundry and thinking about it my reaction is now an amused, "Duh, that's because I *am* sighted!!" What I can, and I think do, bring to this conversation are some things that only vision makes "instantly obvious" that may be utterly opaque for a variety of reasons to someone using screen readers. The way that downloads are being presented by various web browsers keeps changing, seemingly constantly. What I always presume, and I'll be the first to admit that the presumption is sometimes wrong, is that it's possible that, for reasons you allude to, a screen reader user may not "be able to use" a given feature because they literally don't know it's there. I also couple that with a presumption that once they know it's there they're more likely to know how to get to it and use it than I am, particularly without research. Sometimes one or the other of these presumptions is simply not so, and I have no problem being called out on that. That being said, I don't exactly consider presuming much greater expertise on screen readers, and how to use them, among screen reader users while I'm tossing out "things I can see and that may be helpful and that may not be known about," to be "a sighted response" in the purest sense. I'm trying to collaborate. As you know from some of our private correspondence, I seldom accept that something "can't be done" and tend to take the attitude that I/we don't know how to accomplish a given thing but there's got to be a way to do it, and then I dig in to figure out how, often with assistance from "the network" that I have. No one, prior to yourself, in this specific thread has indicated that anything I've mentioned is "something I can't get to," or I would have paused and tried to figure out how to remove that obstacle, if possible. You can be assured when someone says, "I can't do that," which is different than, "But that's not happening," I won't be saying, "Well, tough, you should know how to do that." A "but that's not happening" leads me to, "I'd have to be there to see what is or is not happening," when I cannot replicate the issue in any of the environments I have to try to replicate it in. In that sense I am definitely completely dependent on sight, or as close to completely dependent as can be (I can envision some stuff, but there are limits). Now it's time to play with NVDA and Chrome and downloading something to see exactly how I can (if I can) gain access to the downloads bar at the bottom of the screen or to the same context menu via the downloads menu. Brian
