Re: [Audyssey] monopoly in 21 seconds
Hi Shaun, thanks for sharing this. Definitely quite interesting. The odds of this ever happening in someone's life time are slim to none, but its nice to know the game can be played and won so quickly if lady luck happens to shine on the player at just the right time. Cheers! On 8/13/14, shaun everiss sm.ever...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all. Read this and go lol. Aparently it can be done http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/06/how_to_win_monopoly_in_21_seco.html --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] monopoly in 21 seconds
Lol, the amusing point is player 2 can't even get out of that scenario, if the fates decide that way he's dooomed! Of course, equally player one would be taking a damnable risk using such a big chunk of her money that early in the game. I assume board walk is the square I know in the British London version as mayfare, ie the one right next to go. It also always does seem a little weerd to me to play without the no buying first time round the board rule While I know that rule is optional rather than official (though for a long time I thought it was), it still does seem strange to me to not see it in operation. All the best, Dark. - Original Message - From: shaun everiss sm.ever...@gmail.com To: gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2014 8:19 AM Subject: [Audyssey] monopoly in 21 seconds Hi all. Read this and go lol. Aparently it can be done http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/06/how_to_win_monopoly_in_21_seco.html --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] monopoly in 21 seconds
I find this not very likely. Here's why: When player 1 landed on Illinois Avenue, it should have been bought. Not only is it the most expensive of that group, but there is a card that tells a player to go directly to it. This increases the odds of it being landed on. Then, Player 2: Roll: 5-6, Lands on: Pennsylvania Rail Road Action: None. Comment: At this stage of the game, I would buy any unbought railroad I land on. Cards tell you to go directly to the nearest railroad and pay the owner twice the normal rent. The rent on them doubles each time you buy another one, and they are evenly spaced along the board. If you own all 4, they aren't all that far apart, and you might really rake in the cash from other players to the tune of $400 a pop. --- Be positive! When it comes to being defeated, if you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished! - Original Message - From: shaun everiss sm.ever...@gmail.com To: gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2014 2:19 AM Subject: [Audyssey] monopoly in 21 seconds Hi all. Read this and go lol. Aparently it can be done http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/06/how_to_win_monopoly_in_21_seco.html --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] monopoly in 21 seconds
But being smart about your playing wasn't the idea behind this game; its the *fastest* not smartest way to win that's being put forward. - Original Message - From: Charles Rivard wee1s...@fidnet.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Date sent: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 13:48:42 -0500 Subject: Re: [Audyssey] monopoly in 21 seconds I find this not very likely. Here's why: When player 1 landed on Illinois Avenue, it should have been bought. Not only is it the most expensive of that group, but there is a card that tells a player to go directly to it. This increases the odds of it being landed on. Then, Player 2: Roll: 5-6, Lands on: Pennsylvania Rail Road Action: None. Comment: At this stage of the game, I would buy any unbought railroad I land on. Cards tell you to go directly to the nearest railroad and pay the owner twice the normal rent. The rent on them doubles each time you buy another one, and they are evenly spaced along the board. If you own all 4, they aren't all that far apart, and you might really rake in the cash from other players to the tune of $400 a pop. --- Be positive! When it comes to being defeated, if you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished! - Original Message - From: shaun everiss sm.ever...@gmail.com To: gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2014 2:19 AM Subject: [Audyssey] monopoly in 21 seconds Hi all. Read this and go lol. Aparently it can be done http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/06/how_to_win_monopoly_in_21_seco.html --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] monopoly in 21 seconds
Yep. You're right. Thanks for pointing this out. --- Be positive! When it comes to being defeated, if you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished! - Original Message - From: john jpcarnemo...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2014 2:35 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] monopoly in 21 seconds But being smart about your playing wasn't the idea behind this game; its the *fastest* not smartest way to win that's being put forward. - Original Message - From: Charles Rivard wee1s...@fidnet.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Date sent: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 13:48:42 -0500 Subject: Re: [Audyssey] monopoly in 21 seconds I find this not very likely. Here's why: When player 1 landed on Illinois Avenue, it should have been bought. Not only is it the most expensive of that group, but there is a card that tells a player to go directly to it. This increases the odds of it being landed on. Then, Player 2: Roll: 5-6, Lands on: Pennsylvania Rail Road Action: None. Comment: At this stage of the game, I would buy any unbought railroad I land on. Cards tell you to go directly to the nearest railroad and pay the owner twice the normal rent. The rent on them doubles each time you buy another one, and they are evenly spaced along the board. If you own all 4, they aren't all that far apart, and you might really rake in the cash from other players to the tune of $400 a pop. --- Be positive! When it comes to being defeated, if you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished! - Original Message - From: shaun everiss sm.ever...@gmail.com To: gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2014 2:19 AM Subject: [Audyssey] monopoly in 21 seconds Hi all. Read this and go lol. Aparently it can be done http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/06/how_to_win_monopoly_in_21_seco.html --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] monopoly in 21 seconds
Hi Dark, Yes, Boardwalk and Park Place are the dark blue squares. Boardwalk is right next to go and is the most expensive property on the board. Cheers! On 8/13/14, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Lol, the amusing point is player 2 can't even get out of that scenario, if the fates decide that way he's dooomed! Of course, equally player one would be taking a damnable risk using such a big chunk of her money that early in the game. I assume board walk is the square I know in the British London version as mayfare, ie the one right next to go. It also always does seem a little weerd to me to play without the no buying first time round the board rule While I know that rule is optional rather than official (though for a long time I thought it was), it still does seem strange to me to not see it in operation. All the best, Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] monopoly in 21 seconds
Hi Charles, Agreed, but the point was the fastest game possible. Not necessarily the smartest decisions when playing or what would be a good over all strategy for a typical Monopoly game. The only goal being put forth by the people in the article was seeing how fast they could finish a Monopoly game with the fewest moves possible. The right conditions are so unlikely anyway that I don't see this being realistically feasible. Cheers! On 8/13/14, Charles Rivard wee1s...@fidnet.com wrote: I find this not very likely. Here's why: When player 1 landed on Illinois Avenue, it should have been bought. Not only is it the most expensive of that group, but there is a card that tells a player to go directly to it. This increases the odds of it being landed on. Then, Player 2: Roll: 5-6, Lands on: Pennsylvania Rail Road Action: None. Comment: At this stage of the game, I would buy any unbought railroad I land on. Cards tell you to go directly to the nearest railroad and pay the owner twice the normal rent. The rent on them doubles each time you buy another one, and they are evenly spaced along the board. If you own all 4, they aren't all that far apart, and you might really rake in the cash from other players to the tune of $400 a pop. --- Be positive! When it comes to being defeated, if you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished! --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] monopoly in 21 seconds
Agreed. --- Be positive! When it comes to being defeated, if you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished! - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2014 3:35 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] monopoly in 21 seconds Hi Charles, Agreed, but the point was the fastest game possible. Not necessarily the smartest decisions when playing or what would be a good over all strategy for a typical Monopoly game. The only goal being put forth by the people in the article was seeing how fast they could finish a Monopoly game with the fewest moves possible. The right conditions are so unlikely anyway that I don't see this being realistically feasible. Cheers! On 8/13/14, Charles Rivard wee1s...@fidnet.com wrote: I find this not very likely. Here's why: When player 1 landed on Illinois Avenue, it should have been bought. Not only is it the most expensive of that group, but there is a card that tells a player to go directly to it. This increases the odds of it being landed on. Then, Player 2: Roll: 5-6, Lands on: Pennsylvania Rail Road Action: None. Comment: At this stage of the game, I would buy any unbought railroad I land on. Cards tell you to go directly to the nearest railroad and pay the owner twice the normal rent. The rent on them doubles each time you buy another one, and they are evenly spaced along the board. If you own all 4, they aren't all that far apart, and you might really rake in the cash from other players to the tune of $400 a pop. --- Be positive! When it comes to being defeated, if you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished! --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Freezing up
Well I havn't touched it howevver, I am running the system in ultra compatability mode for the older programs. Uac off and win7 32 bit so everything does work. Its a difference with uac on and 64 bit I imagine. At 05:11 p.m. 30/05/2014, you wrote: So your game went to the dogs?? --- Be positive! When it comes to being defeated, if you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished! - Original Message - From: Jim Kitchen j...@kitchensinc.net To: Steve Cullen Gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2014 4:28 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Freezing up Hi Steve, I'm sorry to hear that my Monopoly game is freezing up. It is not doing that here. I am not sure what to say. But I did just happen to play a game against the computer last night. It did not go well for me. Jim player number 1. on North Carolina Avenue. Select Roll Dice You roll A. 2. and A. 3. for a total of 5 you land on Park Place with 3 Houses. which is owned by, K 9 player number 2 pay rent of 1,100 Dollars Jim player number 1. the Top Hat. your total assets only add up to 1,059 Dollars. so, you are bankrupt! Jim player number 1. the Top Hat. you are out of the game. all of your assets now belong to K 9 player number 2. the Wheelbarrow. press any key The game is over. The winner is K 9 player number 2. the Wheelbarrow. Before Jim player number 1. the Top Hat. landed on Park Place. blue. with 3 Houses. K 9 player number 2. the Wheelbarrow. had 280 Dollars and the following properties. Mediterranean Avenue. purple. with 2 Houses. Baltic Avenue. purple. with 3 Houses. Oriental Avenue. sigh'anne. with 3 Houses. Vermont Avenue. sigh'anne. with 2 Houses. Connecticut Avenue. sigh'anne. with 2 Houses. Electric Company. Pennsylvania Railroad. Saint James Place. gold. with 3 Houses. Tennessee Avenue. gold. with 2 Houses. New York Avenue. gold. with 3 Houses. Atlantic Avenue. yellow. with 3 Houses. Ventnor Avenue. yellow. with 4 Houses. Water Works. Marvin Gardens. yellow. with 3 Houses. Short Line Railroad. Park Place. blue. with 3 Houses. Boardwalk. blue. with 4 Houses. So K 9 player number 2. the Wheelbarrow. your total assets were, 10,680 Dollars Jim Monopoly? No, we just don't want competition --Intel j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Freezing up
Hi Steve, I'm sorry to hear that my Monopoly game is freezing up. It is not doing that here. I am not sure what to say. But I did just happen to play a game against the computer last night. It did not go well for me. Jim player number 1. on North Carolina Avenue. Select Roll Dice You roll A. 2. and A. 3. for a total of 5 you land on Park Place with 3 Houses. which is owned by, K 9 player number 2 pay rent of 1,100 Dollars Jim player number 1. the Top Hat. your total assets only add up to 1,059 Dollars. so, you are bankrupt! Jim player number 1. the Top Hat. you are out of the game. all of your assets now belong to K 9 player number 2. the Wheelbarrow. press any key The game is over. The winner is K 9 player number 2. the Wheelbarrow. Before Jim player number 1. the Top Hat. landed on Park Place. blue. with 3 Houses. K 9 player number 2. the Wheelbarrow. had 280 Dollars and the following properties. Mediterranean Avenue. purple. with 2 Houses. Baltic Avenue. purple. with 3 Houses. Oriental Avenue. sigh'anne. with 3 Houses. Vermont Avenue. sigh'anne. with 2 Houses. Connecticut Avenue. sigh'anne. with 2 Houses. Electric Company. Pennsylvania Railroad. Saint James Place. gold. with 3 Houses. Tennessee Avenue. gold. with 2 Houses. New York Avenue. gold. with 3 Houses. Atlantic Avenue. yellow. with 3 Houses. Ventnor Avenue. yellow. with 4 Houses. Water Works. Marvin Gardens. yellow. with 3 Houses. Short Line Railroad. Park Place. blue. with 3 Houses. Boardwalk. blue. with 4 Houses. So K 9 player number 2. the Wheelbarrow. your total assets were, 10,680 Dollars Jim Monopoly? No, we just don't want competition --Intel j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Freezing up
So your game went to the dogs?? --- Be positive! When it comes to being defeated, if you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished! - Original Message - From: Jim Kitchen j...@kitchensinc.net To: Steve Cullen Gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2014 4:28 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Freezing up Hi Steve, I'm sorry to hear that my Monopoly game is freezing up. It is not doing that here. I am not sure what to say. But I did just happen to play a game against the computer last night. It did not go well for me. Jim player number 1. on North Carolina Avenue. Select Roll Dice You roll A. 2. and A. 3. for a total of 5 you land on Park Place with 3 Houses. which is owned by, K 9 player number 2 pay rent of 1,100 Dollars Jim player number 1. the Top Hat. your total assets only add up to 1,059 Dollars. so, you are bankrupt! Jim player number 1. the Top Hat. you are out of the game. all of your assets now belong to K 9 player number 2. the Wheelbarrow. press any key The game is over. The winner is K 9 player number 2. the Wheelbarrow. Before Jim player number 1. the Top Hat. landed on Park Place. blue. with 3 Houses. K 9 player number 2. the Wheelbarrow. had 280 Dollars and the following properties. Mediterranean Avenue. purple. with 2 Houses. Baltic Avenue. purple. with 3 Houses. Oriental Avenue. sigh'anne. with 3 Houses. Vermont Avenue. sigh'anne. with 2 Houses. Connecticut Avenue. sigh'anne. with 2 Houses. Electric Company. Pennsylvania Railroad. Saint James Place. gold. with 3 Houses. Tennessee Avenue. gold. with 2 Houses. New York Avenue. gold. with 3 Houses. Atlantic Avenue. yellow. with 3 Houses. Ventnor Avenue. yellow. with 4 Houses. Water Works. Marvin Gardens. yellow. with 3 Houses. Short Line Railroad. Park Place. blue. with 3 Houses. Boardwalk. blue. with 4 Houses. So K 9 player number 2. the Wheelbarrow. your total assets were, 10,680 Dollars Jim Monopoly? No, we just don't want competition --Intel j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly-type games - Re: Some practical questions reguarding the Monopoly game
Hi Tom. that is unfortunately true, though one interesting fact in beatemup terms is that for everyone the casual beatemup is sort of a thing of the past. After all when I was growing up it was quite possible to walk into an arcade or a friends house and pick up something like mortal combat, streetfighter 2, double dragon etc, and within only a short time of playing with the controls and knowing special moves have a vague idea how to play. Of course, you'd always lose to a more experienced opponent, but the basic jumps, kicks, punches and even most of the specials were fairly easy to pull off. With modern beatemup series like blazblu, guilty gear, soul calibur etc, the shear complexity of the system, the numbers of super moves, special blocks, dodges etc mean that for anyone! there isn't much chance of doing any good without investigating first, indeed among people who I know who are serious beatemup fans this has become a major concern. Of course, add on blindness to that and your increasing that learning factor by a ridiculous amount, plus the more casual games that are intended for pickup and play in groups such as marrio party, Wii sports, animal crossing and to a certain extent pokemon just are none starters. Beware the grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly-type games - Re: Some practical questions reguarding the Monopoly game
I think the problem today isn't so much the game complexity, more the interinteraction complexity. I've seen a few slogans in my time and the best one I've seen is simple to learn difficult to master. The simple to learn bit should be the game interface. The difficult to master should be the game itself not the interface. -Original Message- From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of dark Sent: 10 December 2013 13:32 To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly-type games - Re: Some practical questions reguarding the Monopoly game Hi Tom. that is unfortunately true, though one interesting fact in beatemup terms is that for everyone the casual beatemup is sort of a thing of the past. After all when I was growing up it was quite possible to walk into an arcade or a friends house and pick up something like mortal combat, streetfighter 2, double dragon etc, and within only a short time of playing with the controls and knowing special moves have a vague idea how to play. Of course, you'd always lose to a more experienced opponent, but the basic jumps, kicks, punches and even most of the specials were fairly easy to pull off. With modern beatemup series like blazblu, guilty gear, soul calibur etc, the shear complexity of the system, the numbers of super moves, special blocks, dodges etc mean that for anyone! there isn't much chance of doing any good without investigating first, indeed among people who I know who are serious beatemup fans this has become a major concern. Of course, add on blindness to that and your increasing that learning factor by a ridiculous amount, plus the more casual games that are intended for pickup and play in groups such as marrio party, Wii sports, animal crossing and to a certain extent pokemon just are none starters. Beware the grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly-type games - Re: Some practical questions reguarding the Monopoly game
Chess is a game that applies here. ,simple to learn, but hard to excell at. Sent from my iPhone On Dec 10, 2013, at 9:41 AM, Darren Harris darren_g_har...@btinternet.com wrote: I think the problem today isn't so much the game complexity, more the interinteraction complexity. I've seen a few slogans in my time and the best one I've seen is simple to learn difficult to master. The simple to learn bit should be the game interface. The difficult to master should be the game itself not the interface. -Original Message- From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of dark Sent: 10 December 2013 13:32 To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly-type games - Re: Some practical questions reguarding the Monopoly game Hi Tom. that is unfortunately true, though one interesting fact in beatemup terms is that for everyone the casual beatemup is sort of a thing of the past. After all when I was growing up it was quite possible to walk into an arcade or a friends house and pick up something like mortal combat, streetfighter 2, double dragon etc, and within only a short time of playing with the controls and knowing special moves have a vague idea how to play. Of course, you'd always lose to a more experienced opponent, but the basic jumps, kicks, punches and even most of the specials were fairly easy to pull off. With modern beatemup series like blazblu, guilty gear, soul calibur etc, the shear complexity of the system, the numbers of super moves, special blocks, dodges etc mean that for anyone! there isn't much chance of doing any good without investigating first, indeed among people who I know who are serious beatemup fans this has become a major concern. Of course, add on blindness to that and your increasing that learning factor by a ridiculous amount, plus the more casual games that are intended for pickup and play in groups such as marrio party, Wii sports, animal crossing and to a certain extent pokemon just are none starters. Beware the grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly-type games - Re: Some practical questions reguarding the Monopoly game
Hi Dark: Exactly. Although, Wii Sports is arguable. I have played Wii Sports with little difficulty so that game at least is arguably more accessible than most games, but I take your point about most pick up and play games are non-staarters if you are blind. On 12/10/13, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi Tom. that is unfortunately true, though one interesting fact in beatemup terms is that for everyone the casual beatemup is sort of a thing of the past. After all when I was growing up it was quite possible to walk into an arcade or a friends house and pick up something like mortal combat, streetfighter 2, double dragon etc, and within only a short time of playing with the controls and knowing special moves have a vague idea how to play. Of course, you'd always lose to a more experienced opponent, but the basic jumps, kicks, punches and even most of the specials were fairly easy to pull off. With modern beatemup series like blazblu, guilty gear, soul calibur etc, the shear complexity of the system, the numbers of super moves, special blocks, dodges etc mean that for anyone! there isn't much chance of doing any good without investigating first, indeed among people who I know who are serious beatemup fans this has become a major concern. Of course, add on blindness to that and your increasing that learning factor by a ridiculous amount, plus the more casual games that are intended for pickup and play in groups such as marrio party, Wii sports, animal crossing and to a certain extent pokemon just are none starters. Beware the grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly-type games - Re: Some practical questions reguarding the Monopoly game
Hi Shaun: Interesting. That sounds like it was real fun. I haven't had anything like that lately either. However, it goes back to what I said earlier on the list. It all depends on the people you know and hang with. Some people really love board games, others are into video games, and some don't play either one just because they are too busy or just not interested If there is a college or university near by you can sometimes find clubs in your area that get together and that can be a good way to associate with people your own age. Unfortunately, I live in a little one-horse town, no colleges, universities, etc so that option isn't open to me as far as I know, but back when I lived in Dayton there were all kinds of groups to join where I could play board games, RPG games, video games, etc. There were local Chess clubs, and there were places to go play Bingo and so on. Point being if you wanted to I am sure there are places to go and play that sort of thing. Cheers! On 12/6/13, shaun everiss sm.ever...@gmail.com wrote: Well speaking of memmories tom, I was on holiday about 4 years back with several friends. At nights we would have monopoly tourniments lasting the entire holiday. Games would go from 6 till midnight and beyond. One day we got oup late due to one of such games having meals at weird times only to get back into the game again and go all night. That sadly has all gone for the most part. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly-type games - Re: Some practicalquestions reguarding the Monopoly game
Well Darren, for sighted users beatemups don't have a complex interface in terms of understanding what is going on. The problem tends to come in terms of multiple block types, innumerable moves some of which counter others, super moves, earning some bonuses from how you play that give you other moves to use. Heck, blazblu has a different mechanic for each character. For example there is one character who can control wind and direction, and by changing the direction of the wind as she fights she can do things like slow down her oponent's movement in a given direction or speed herself up. Another blazblu character is a little boy who control a huge animated puppet. The puppet acts automatically and by doing different special moves from the boy you give the puppet different instructions, thus it's possible to for example pincer your opponet between you or have the puppet block opponent's attacks, however since the boy is much faster than the puppet all of this takes ridiculoous working out even aside from the different move combinations. All of this isn't a bad thing in moderation, but apparently it's now getting to the point where while even 10 or 5 years ago beatemups like soul calibur were able to be picked up by anyone, they're now becoming such a specialist interest that only major fans of the genre will bother, indeed I've heard even some factions of the major fan base are getting a little irritated with this overblown complexity. indeed, some people are seeeing it as another symptom of the gaming industry going a bit too far away from actually making good game mechanics and just concentrating on adding more and more gymmics. Beware the Grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly-type games - Re: Some practical questions reguarding the Monopoly game
Fair enough Tom. I admit while I've briefly played a couple of the Wii sports games it's not something I've done as frequently or know as much about as I do beatemups so my assessment on the complexities of picking the thing up and playing without sight might be off. Beware the Grue! Ark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly-type games - Re: Some practical questionsreguarding the Monopoly game
I didn't have that much of that sort of thing but I did get on skype with some friends and over the radio station I do stuff with do semi play games. Simular to dnd the , and when it gets to a point a decision needs to be made he poles the group of us usually 2 or 3 on the server. At 03:04 AM 12/6/2013, you wrote: I had a group of friends in Arizona who regularly came over and played Tenpin Alley. They also got a kick out of the fact that there was no way to cheat. The computer monitor was turned off, even though they could not use it when playing the game. Everything was done using their ears. --- Shepherds are the best beasts, but Labs are a close second. - Original Message - From: dark d...@xgam.org To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Thursday, December 05, 2013 3:17 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly-type games - Re: Some practical questionsreguarding the Monopoly game Hi tom. while I agree that card and board games do have value as games to play with others, at the same time computer games can have a similar feeling provided you have a group of like minded individuals together and provided the game is one that several people can have fun with rather than say a flight sim or complex stratogy game that requires massive attention. I remember the occasion when i still lived in colidge where a couple of friends of mine visited me, but managed to turn up an hour early so I was in the shower. In defference of what to do, I literally yelled instructions through the bathroom door (I was living in one room in colidge with a single attached bathroom), for them to start up Jim Kitchin's game of life, and we played that while I finished my shower. that was hilarious and good fun as well. As well as playing Talisman and King of Tokio, my brother also regularly plays the marrio party games with his friends as well, which are intended as exactly what they say, ie party games, like computerised board games on the Wii. He also has recently bought the new Pokemon game and a 3ds, and when not playing a ccg with his friends they also challenge each other to Pokemon battles. Of course, since my brother is a major CCG player, he knows plenty of people who do that sort of thing, and indeed if the games (of either computerised or not), were accessible odds are I'd do the same more often with my rp friends. It all seems to depend upon the games involved and the group of people and what they choose to do, though I will say where as computer games, even casual ones like marrio party or Jim Kitchin's are something of their own interest, anyone can pick up a good amount of board games and play them out of the box, making them a far more universal thing. That is another reason I'd love to see more accessible interesting games. Beware the Grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly-type games - Re: Some practical questions reguarding the Monopoly game
Well mar-dy have not been forthcoming with codes as of late but on a more serious issue, though the game does run on my win7 machine in admin mode I do get errors with html modules and game does not run right. I wish I knew before I spent the cash on it. At 03:47 AM 12/5/2013, you wrote: One computer game that has been referred to as sort of like Monopoly on steroids is Mississippi. Tom: You are absolutely right about the importance of board games when it comes to human interaction. We used to do a lot of summer vacationing on the Colorado river. Pinochle cards, a tactual version of Monopoly, and a copy of Yahtzee were always taken. I kept my score using a slate and stylus and blank braille paper, the cards were brailled, and we had fun during the evenings if the weather was bad. This was before I found computers or games played on them. Later on, a chess set was added. --- Shepherds are the best beasts, but Labs are a close second. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2013 3:18 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Some practical questions reguarding the Monopoly game Hi Shaun: Hmm...I don't know of that game specifically, but there have been many clones of Monopoly out there. One of my favorites was a game called Hotels where you went around the world building famous hotels. It was a lot cooler than Monopoly, but unfortunately I no longer have a copy of that game since my wife absconded with it. In any case I disagree with you that computer games are inherently superior to the board games themselves. Yeah, we can play them ourselves, but there is much to recommend an actual board game over a computer game. For one thing if you have family to play them with it gives you and the family a chance to sit down and interact with one another. Something that is really missing in today's society. Another thing is board games gives us something tactile to feel. Most games comes with plastic or metal figures we can feel to get an idea of what they look like. We can feel the little plastic ships, buildings, and other things which gives us something more than just our imagination to go on. You are probably right to a point that many younger people are less and less interested in card and board games and are addicted to console and PC games. I blame their parents for that as it is up to the parents to teach their children balance. While I have purchased a Wii for my son and he plays a lot of video games I also have made sure to give him standard games like Monopoly, Trouble, Sorry, etc as I think it is important that he learns to enjoy both the way I did growing up. Cheers! On 12/3/13, shaun everiss sm.ever...@gmail.com wrote: One of the games I still miss was based on the monopoly concept. You were trying to become the presidant of a company. if you failed you would become the cleaner. It was visual but I got materials and designed a board with cardboard and foil and with some braille dice and cards and some monopoly tokens was able to play. The game was called ulsas but I never played it more than twice before things got hectic. To be honest, I played all my games before 2000, before 1995 for 5 years I had almost no pc and then only a 386. in 1996 I got a pc but still was able to play. after 2002 or there abouts that got less till now. I have an xp system and a win7 system. everyone has tablets and phones. I think if there was a way to turn off all devices and the net I'd do it again. But there is email, social network, online games and sometimes I find myself just happily mucking round on youtube or slothing round on the pc when I know I shouldn't. I have tried to keep my reading alive but the scary thing is I could happily stop reading braille in fact stop doing everything I used to do when taught how to be blind to use the net. It may actually happen with others. Family that used to have time to play afterwork are so tired after looking at a screen all day they want to blob.Ofcause computer games are ofcause more superior than the crappy board ones, yet I still miss it. When the only thing you could hear would be the weather outside, when all you did in the next hour or less was get another coffee. That doesn't happen so much. And sadly a lot born into this age of consoles and other things may never play a game in their lives. I know, my cousins were born into the borg universe. They adapted a lot. They have played a few ugio games and some monopoly but most of it is simply the computer. They would probably play all night and day if they were not told to get off their consoles. Its why I made an effort to stay off social networks but much as I have tried, most of what I do is to be online all day and all night. Something new always comes up and when there isn't I end up mucking round chewing bandwidth listening to stupid vids, but not being able to get off again really. Some days
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly-type games - Re: Some practical questions reguarding the Monopoly game
Hi Dark, Well, you are absolutely right it all depends on the group in question and the game at hand. I have never had the fortune of meeting anyone in my area would sit down with me and play a game of Jim Kitchen's Life or Monopoly, but I have been able to find some people who will sit down and play the standard board games with me. It seems to me a brailed board game with print and braille is the best and most universal way for us as blind and low vision gamers to play along with our sighted friends and family as equals rather than just tagging along. I know some gamers here and on Audiogames.net have become masters at fighting games for XBox and Play Station, can hold their own against sighted opponents, but that someone is not me. So while I suppose I could invite people over to play Play Station or XBox I am not that good at it to really get much pleasure out of it the way some people do. Moreover it takes a lot of practice and work for a blind gamer to compete in such games. A board game I can pick up and begin playing in minutes as long as it is properly accessible and I know the rules where video games require weeks of practice to become decent at let alone a master at. So as you said anyone can pick up a board game and play it out of the box making it a more universal thing. Cheers! On 12/5/13, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi tom. while I agree that card and board games do have value as games to play with others, at the same time computer games can have a similar feeling provided you have a group of like minded individuals together and provided the game is one that several people can have fun with rather than say a flight sim or complex stratogy game that requires massive attention. I remember the occasion when i still lived in colidge where a couple of friends of mine visited me, but managed to turn up an hour early so I was in the shower. In defference of what to do, I literally yelled instructions through the bathroom door (I was living in one room in colidge with a single attached bathroom), for them to start up Jim Kitchin's game of life, and we played that while I finished my shower. that was hilarious and good fun as well. As well as playing Talisman and King of Tokio, my brother also regularly plays the marrio party games with his friends as well, which are intended as exactly what they say, ie party games, like computerised board games on the Wii. He also has recently bought the new Pokemon game and a 3ds, and when not playing a ccg with his friends they also challenge each other to Pokemon battles. Of course, since my brother is a major CCG player, he knows plenty of people who do that sort of thing, and indeed if the games (of either computerised or not), were accessible odds are I'd do the same more often with my rp friends. It all seems to depend upon the games involved and the group of people and what they choose to do, though I will say where as computer games, even casual ones like marrio party or Jim Kitchin's are something of their own interest, anyone can pick up a good amount of board games and play them out of the box, making them a far more universal thing. That is another reason I'd love to see more accessible interesting games. Beware the Grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly-type games - Re: Some practical questions reguarding the Monopoly game
Well speaking of memmories tom, I was on holiday about 4 years back with several friends. At nights we would have monopoly tourniments lasting the entire holiday. Games would go from 6 till midnight and beyond. One day we got oup late due to one of such games having meals at weird times only to get back into the game again and go all night. That sadly has all gone for the most part. At 09:02 PM 12/5/2013, you wrote: Hi Charles: I had a similar experience growing up. For many years my mom, some family friends, and I would have game nights every Friday or Saturday night where we would play one card or board game well into the night. Especially during the winter when it was too cold to do anything outside. We played Monopoly, Yahtzee, Poker, Uno, and so on. The thing I remember most is the interaction between everyone. We sat around drinking cups of coffee or hot chocolate, munched on chips, and talked. We told stories, exchanged jokes, and added the occasional tease when someone screwed up or won big. The thing is playing computer games just does not have the community interaction or same fun as playing against human opponents. Cheers! On 12/4/13, Charles Rivard wee1s...@fidnet.com wrote: One computer game that has been referred to as sort of like Monopoly on steroids is Mississippi. Tom: You are absolutely right about the importance of board games when it comes to human interaction. We used to do a lot of summer vacationing on the Colorado river. Pinochle cards, a tactual version of Monopoly, and a copy of Yahtzee were always taken. I kept my score using a slate and stylus and blank braille paper, the cards were brailled, and we had fun during the evenings if the weather was bad. This was before I found computers or games played on them. Later on, a chess set was added. --- Shepherds are the best beasts, but Labs are a close second. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly-type games - Re: Some practical questions reguarding the Monopoly game
Hi Charles: I had a similar experience growing up. For many years my mom, some family friends, and I would have game nights every Friday or Saturday night where we would play one card or board game well into the night. Especially during the winter when it was too cold to do anything outside. We played Monopoly, Yahtzee, Poker, Uno, and so on. The thing I remember most is the interaction between everyone. We sat around drinking cups of coffee or hot chocolate, munched on chips, and talked. We told stories, exchanged jokes, and added the occasional tease when someone screwed up or won big. The thing is playing computer games just does not have the community interaction or same fun as playing against human opponents. Cheers! On 12/4/13, Charles Rivard wee1s...@fidnet.com wrote: One computer game that has been referred to as sort of like Monopoly on steroids is Mississippi. Tom: You are absolutely right about the importance of board games when it comes to human interaction. We used to do a lot of summer vacationing on the Colorado river. Pinochle cards, a tactual version of Monopoly, and a copy of Yahtzee were always taken. I kept my score using a slate and stylus and blank braille paper, the cards were brailled, and we had fun during the evenings if the weather was bad. This was before I found computers or games played on them. Later on, a chess set was added. --- Shepherds are the best beasts, but Labs are a close second. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly-type games - Re: Some practical questions reguarding the Monopoly game
Hi tom. while I agree that card and board games do have value as games to play with others, at the same time computer games can have a similar feeling provided you have a group of like minded individuals together and provided the game is one that several people can have fun with rather than say a flight sim or complex stratogy game that requires massive attention. I remember the occasion when i still lived in colidge where a couple of friends of mine visited me, but managed to turn up an hour early so I was in the shower. In defference of what to do, I literally yelled instructions through the bathroom door (I was living in one room in colidge with a single attached bathroom), for them to start up Jim Kitchin's game of life, and we played that while I finished my shower. that was hilarious and good fun as well. As well as playing Talisman and King of Tokio, my brother also regularly plays the marrio party games with his friends as well, which are intended as exactly what they say, ie party games, like computerised board games on the Wii. He also has recently bought the new Pokemon game and a 3ds, and when not playing a ccg with his friends they also challenge each other to Pokemon battles. Of course, since my brother is a major CCG player, he knows plenty of people who do that sort of thing, and indeed if the games (of either computerised or not), were accessible odds are I'd do the same more often with my rp friends. It all seems to depend upon the games involved and the group of people and what they choose to do, though I will say where as computer games, even casual ones like marrio party or Jim Kitchin's are something of their own interest, anyone can pick up a good amount of board games and play them out of the box, making them a far more universal thing. That is another reason I'd love to see more accessible interesting games. Beware the Grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly-type games - Re: Some practical questionsreguarding the Monopoly game
I had a group of friends in Arizona who regularly came over and played Tenpin Alley. They also got a kick out of the fact that there was no way to cheat. The computer monitor was turned off, even though they could not use it when playing the game. Everything was done using their ears. --- Shepherds are the best beasts, but Labs are a close second. - Original Message - From: dark d...@xgam.org To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Thursday, December 05, 2013 3:17 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly-type games - Re: Some practical questionsreguarding the Monopoly game Hi tom. while I agree that card and board games do have value as games to play with others, at the same time computer games can have a similar feeling provided you have a group of like minded individuals together and provided the game is one that several people can have fun with rather than say a flight sim or complex stratogy game that requires massive attention. I remember the occasion when i still lived in colidge where a couple of friends of mine visited me, but managed to turn up an hour early so I was in the shower. In defference of what to do, I literally yelled instructions through the bathroom door (I was living in one room in colidge with a single attached bathroom), for them to start up Jim Kitchin's game of life, and we played that while I finished my shower. that was hilarious and good fun as well. As well as playing Talisman and King of Tokio, my brother also regularly plays the marrio party games with his friends as well, which are intended as exactly what they say, ie party games, like computerised board games on the Wii. He also has recently bought the new Pokemon game and a 3ds, and when not playing a ccg with his friends they also challenge each other to Pokemon battles. Of course, since my brother is a major CCG player, he knows plenty of people who do that sort of thing, and indeed if the games (of either computerised or not), were accessible odds are I'd do the same more often with my rp friends. It all seems to depend upon the games involved and the group of people and what they choose to do, though I will say where as computer games, even casual ones like marrio party or Jim Kitchin's are something of their own interest, anyone can pick up a good amount of board games and play them out of the box, making them a far more universal thing. That is another reason I'd love to see more accessible interesting games. Beware the Grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] monopoly tokens
Hi Curt, One time I was on the phone and a friend used a rather long wav file for his token. It worked just fine. Each turn took forever, but it worked. So as far as I know there is no size limit for the token sound files. They do need to be standard wav files though. You know, no mp3, ogg or anything like that. If you would like to send me the sound file, maybe I could try it and see if I can figure out what went wrong. BFN Jim The last sound that it made was Zap . j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Folks, Ever since Jim created his Monopoly game I've wanted to play with different token sounds rather than the original walking sound. Old timers will recognize some of them from my PCS Monopoly game for DOS. The game gives you this text list and you hit enter to try the sound, which plays four times to simulate a dice roll of four. So you can try the sound out before you pick it. You can also add your own sounds to the list by having the file name match the format of the others in the game such as, monopolytokenWheel.wav Here is the current list: Ball. Basketball. Bear. Boat. Bounce. Camera. CaneTap. Cannon. Car. CarHorn. Cat. Chicken. Clock. Dog. Duck. Frog. Gun. Horse. Iron. Lantern. Money. Original. Parrot. Pig. Purse. Racecar. RockingHorse. Sheep. Shoe. Shoe2. Thimble. TopHat. Train. Wheel. - Original Message - From: Jim Kitchen j...@kitchensinc.net To: Gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2012 3:25 PM Subject: [Audyssey] Monopoly Hi, I have put a new file up on my site. File name; winpolyx.exe File size; 1.2m bytes. In version 10 of Monopoly you choose a sound for your token. And the game now creates a monopolylog.txt file. The winpolyx.exe file can be found on my free windows sapi5 text to speech games page. Have fun. BFN Jim Kitchen's Inc, for games that are up to 110 percent funner to play. j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1430 / Virus Database: 2634/5490 - Release Date: 12/27/12 --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9
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 --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9
Hi Thomas, That is very cool that Quentin has written a rapper to the screen readers and sapi5. What I was actually wondering was, if I use that rapper, or write my own code, would it work with all versions of Jaws, all versions of Window Eyes, all versions of Hal etc. Really just wondering as I like and like using sapi5. BFN Jim I just bought a cured ham. Wonder what it had? j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9
Hi Rishi, Thank you very much. I will keep your offer in mind. BFN - Original Message - Also jim, If you want, I can help with all the sounds as well for your games free of charge since your games are free of charge for the blind. Rishi D Mack Skype: zmackrishi Email: cg...@live.com Feel free to contact me anytime :) Jim The last sound that it made was Zap . j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9
Hi Phil, I can only use standard wav files. That is all that DirectX 8.1 can play. With a 0.175 time limit we are not going to get much of a train, dog, car or whatever sound are we? Thanks BFN - Original Message - Hi Jim, That Monopoly game was released in 1996, and sound modifying was not what it is today with pitch shifting and compression of sounds. I would be happy to re-create the sounds of the tokens all with the same 0.175 time in playing the monopoly2.wav walking sound. Phil Jim Half our live is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save. j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9
LOL Wish I was so fortunate.. lol :) Rishi D Mack Skype: zmackrishi Email: cg...@live.com Feel free to contact me anytime :) -Original Message- From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of shaun everiss Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2012 11:47 PM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9 Well sapi is fine but it can be general crap if you don't have a highquality voice. Ofcause that may not be in your budjet to get one. The only reason I have a high quality realspeak is that a friend gave me his jaws8 8 cd he didn't want. Else I would probably shell out on ivona which for me is 100 per full language 200 for both us and uk, which I intend to get. At 02:27 p.m. 2/12/2012 -0400, you wrote: I don't mean to be rude or bash sapi. but I don't like it that much. so that's why I ask if it can be worked with jaws. or some way to implement it. Rishi D Mack Skype: zmackrishi Email: cg...@live.com Feel free to contact me anytime :) -Original Message- From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Ward Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2012 1:13 PM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9 Hello Rishi, All of Jim's games output spoken feedback using Microsoft Sapi so you don't need Jaws or any other screen reader to play. Cheers! On 12/2/12, rishi mack cg...@live.com wrote: Hi, can this also work with jaws? if so what do I need. Rishi D Mack Skype: zmackrishi Email: cg...@live.com Feel free to contact me anytime :) --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9
Hi Rishi, No, sorry, but my text to speech games all only use the sapi5 text to speech engine. When I started writing the games I had no idea how to write directly to Jaws, Window Eyes, Hal or NVDA. So I just went with the sapi5 speech engine to make the games self voicing. Well actually NVDA did not even exist back then, and who knows if all versions of the screen readers all work the same. I am still running a very old version of Jaws. But I also do not have Window Eyes or Hal to test the code etc. BFN Jim Check my web site for my free blind accessible pc dos and windows games. j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9
Hi Phil, Cool, I'm glad to hear that you now have my monopoly game working correctly. Thanks for letting me know. I will think about it, but I remember that when your monopoly game had a sound for each of the tokens it took a long time for some of the tokens to move. That is why I just went with the step sound for moving the tokens. BFN Jim Monopoly? No, we just don't want competition --Intel j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9
Hi Jim, That Monopoly game was released in 1996, and sound modifying was not what it is today with pitch shifting and compression of sounds. I would be happy to re-create the sounds of the tokens all with the same 0.175 time in playing the monopoly2.wav walking sound. Phil - Original Message - From: Jim Kitchen j...@kitchensinc.net To: Phil Vlasak Gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Monday, December 03, 2012 4:20 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9 Hi Phil, Cool, I'm glad to hear that you now have my monopoly game working correctly. Thanks for letting me know. I will think about it, but I remember that when your monopoly game had a sound for each of the tokens it took a long time for some of the tokens to move. That is why I just went with the step sound for moving the tokens. BFN Jim Monopoly? No, we just don't want competition --Intel j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1427 / Virus Database: 2629/5432 - Release Date: 12/02/12 --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9
Also jim, If you want, I can help with all the sounds as well for your games free of charge since your games are free of charge for the blind. Rishi D Mack Skype: zmackrishi Email: cg...@live.com Feel free to contact me anytime :) -Original Message- From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Phil Vlasak Sent: Monday, December 03, 2012 6:33 AM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9 Hi Jim, That Monopoly game was released in 1996, and sound modifying was not what it is today with pitch shifting and compression of sounds. I would be happy to re-create the sounds of the tokens all with the same 0.175 time in playing the monopoly2.wav walking sound. Phil - Original Message - From: Jim Kitchen j...@kitchensinc.net To: Phil Vlasak Gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Monday, December 03, 2012 4:20 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9 Hi Phil, Cool, I'm glad to hear that you now have my monopoly game working correctly. Thanks for letting me know. I will think about it, but I remember that when your monopoly game had a sound for each of the tokens it took a long time for some of the tokens to move. That is why I just went with the step sound for moving the tokens. BFN Jim Monopoly? No, we just don't want competition --Intel j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1427 / Virus Database: 2629/5432 - Release Date: 12/02/12 --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9
Hi Jim, In my Vista computer When I started the game it didn't bring up the list of boards. I had picked the default as c:\program files I moved the Kitchensinc folder to c:\users\Phil\games and it now works. One suggestion, As the tokens right now have no affect on the game how about if you add, MonopolyToken1.wav to MonopolyToken16.wav to the game to represent the sound that each token makes when walking around the board. It would give the tokens a reason for being in the game. Of course the token sounds would be those of the default ones. But if you wanted to add a jet plane as token1 you could then replace the battleship sound with that of a jet plane sound. You could still keep the MonopolyToken0.wav as the current walking sound. Phil - Original Message - From: Jim Kitchen j...@kitchensinc.net To: Phil Vlasak Gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Saturday, December 01, 2012 5:59 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9 Hi Phil, I don't know, I put monopoly version 9 out in December of 2008. It did then and still does list and allow me to choose the board to play. Maybe some new setting in Windows does not allow a program to explore the folder, or maybe you held the enter key down too long and chose the default original board. I just don't know. BFN - Original Message - Hi Jim, I just played your Monopoly game for the first time in a long time. I remember you saying that you had to remove the list of boards from the game but I thought you planned to add that feature in a future version. As your board file maker brings up the list, why doesn't the game itself? I planned to update the New York City board adding the National September 11 Memorial Museum and the new One World Trade Center building. Phil - Original Message - From: Jim Kitchen j...@kitchensinc.net To: Gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 3:59 AM Subject: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9 Hi, I have put a new file up on my site. File name winpoly9.exe File size 705k The file can be found on my free windows sapi5 text to speech games page. In Monopoly version 9 the board files now contain things like the tokens, the currency and other squares on the board. There is also now a separate monopoly board file maker program that can create a new board file or edit an existing one. BFN Jim Kitchen's Inc, for games that are up to 100 percent funner to play. j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- Jim After four decimal places, nobody gives a damn. j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1427 / Virus Database: 2629/5428 - Release Date: 11/30/12 --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9
Hi, can this also work with jaws? if so what do I need. Rishi D Mack Skype: zmackrishi Email: cg...@live.com Feel free to contact me anytime :) -Original Message- From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Phil Vlasak Sent: Friday, November 30, 2012 9:22 PM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9 Hi Jim, I just played your Monopoly game for the first time in a long time. I remember you saying that you had to remove the list of boards from the game but I thought you planned to add that feature in a future version. As your board file maker brings up the list, why doesn't the game itself? I planned to update the New York City board adding the National September 11 Memorial Museum and the new One World Trade Center building. Phil - Original Message - From: Jim Kitchen j...@kitchensinc.net To: Gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 3:59 AM Subject: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9 Hi, I have put a new file up on my site. File name winpoly9.exe File size 705k The file can be found on my free windows sapi5 text to speech games page. In Monopoly version 9 the board files now contain things like the tokens, the currency and other squares on the board. There is also now a separate monopoly board file maker program that can create a new board file or edit an existing one. BFN Jim Kitchen's Inc, for games that are up to 100 percent funner to play. j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9
Hello Rishi, All of Jim's games output spoken feedback using Microsoft Sapi so you don't need Jaws or any other screen reader to play. Cheers! On 12/2/12, rishi mack cg...@live.com wrote: Hi, can this also work with jaws? if so what do I need. Rishi D Mack Skype: zmackrishi Email: cg...@live.com Feel free to contact me anytime :) --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9
Hi Jim, The only thing I can come up with to account for this behavior would be Microsoft User Account Control. Beginning with Vista onwards Microsoft has changed the security restrictions on certain directories such as C:\Program Files and while the option to explore directories still exists it may not let you do it as a standard user. There are two possible solutions for this problem. One, Phil can turn off User Account Control in the Control Panel. Two, he can reinstall all of your games in a local directory such as C:\Users\Phil\Games which he has full user permissions to access. Either way he needs to bypass UAC if he wants the games to work as your games don't meet current design standards for Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8. Cheers! On 12/1/12, Jim Kitchen j...@kitchensinc.net wrote: Hi Phil, I don't know, I put monopoly version 9 out in December of 2008. It did then and still does list and allow me to choose the board to play. Maybe some new setting in Windows does not allow a program to explore the folder, or maybe you held the enter key down too long and chose the default original board. I just don't know. BFN --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9
I don't mean to be rude or bash sapi. but I don't like it that much. so that's why I ask if it can be worked with jaws. or some way to implement it. Rishi D Mack Skype: zmackrishi Email: cg...@live.com Feel free to contact me anytime :) -Original Message- From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Ward Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2012 1:13 PM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9 Hello Rishi, All of Jim's games output spoken feedback using Microsoft Sapi so you don't need Jaws or any other screen reader to play. Cheers! On 12/2/12, rishi mack cg...@live.com wrote: Hi, can this also work with jaws? if so what do I need. Rishi D Mack Skype: zmackrishi Email: cg...@live.com Feel free to contact me anytime :) --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9
HiRishi, No Jim's Monopoly only uses SAPI. If you don't like the SAPI voice on your computer you can fine and or buy other voices. I purchased mine from www.nextup.com They are usually of much higher quality than the ones you get with Windows. Phil - Original Message - From: rishi mack cg...@live.com To: 'Gamers Discussion list' gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2012 1:27 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9 I don't mean to be rude or bash sapi. but I don't like it that much. so that's why I ask if it can be worked with jaws. or some way to implement it. Rishi D Mack --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9
Well sapi is fine but it can be general crap if you don't have a highquality voice. Ofcause that may not be in your budjet to get one. The only reason I have a high quality realspeak is that a friend gave me his jaws8 8 cd he didn't want. Else I would probably shell out on ivona which for me is 100 per full language 200 for both us and uk, which I intend to get. At 02:27 p.m. 2/12/2012 -0400, you wrote: I don't mean to be rude or bash sapi. but I don't like it that much. so that's why I ask if it can be worked with jaws. or some way to implement it. Rishi D Mack Skype: zmackrishi Email: cg...@live.com Feel free to contact me anytime :) -Original Message- From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Ward Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2012 1:13 PM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9 Hello Rishi, All of Jim's games output spoken feedback using Microsoft Sapi so you don't need Jaws or any other screen reader to play. Cheers! On 12/2/12, rishi mack cg...@live.com wrote: Hi, can this also work with jaws? if so what do I need. Rishi D Mack Skype: zmackrishi Email: cg...@live.com Feel free to contact me anytime :) --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9
Hi Phil, I don't know, I put monopoly version 9 out in December of 2008. It did then and still does list and allow me to choose the board to play. Maybe some new setting in Windows does not allow a program to explore the folder, or maybe you held the enter key down too long and chose the default original board. I just don't know. BFN - Original Message - Hi Jim, I just played your Monopoly game for the first time in a long time. I remember you saying that you had to remove the list of boards from the game but I thought you planned to add that feature in a future version. As your board file maker brings up the list, why doesn't the game itself? I planned to update the New York City board adding the National September 11 Memorial Museum and the new One World Trade Center building. Phil - Original Message - From: Jim Kitchen j...@kitchensinc.net To: Gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 3:59 AM Subject: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9 Hi, I have put a new file up on my site. File name winpoly9.exe File size 705k The file can be found on my free windows sapi5 text to speech games page. In Monopoly version 9 the board files now contain things like the tokens, the currency and other squares on the board. There is also now a separate monopoly board file maker program that can create a new board file or edit an existing one. BFN Jim Kitchen's Inc, for games that are up to 100 percent funner to play. j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- Jim After four decimal places, nobody gives a damn. j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9
Hi Jim, I just played your Monopoly game for the first time in a long time. I remember you saying that you had to remove the list of boards from the game but I thought you planned to add that feature in a future version. As your board file maker brings up the list, why doesn't the game itself? I planned to update the New York City board adding the National September 11 Memorial Museum and the new One World Trade Center building. Phil - Original Message - From: Jim Kitchen j...@kitchensinc.net To: Gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 3:59 AM Subject: [Audyssey] Monopoly version 9 Hi, I have put a new file up on my site. File name winpoly9.exe File size 705k The file can be found on my free windows sapi5 text to speech games page. In Monopoly version 9 the board files now contain things like the tokens, the currency and other squares on the board. There is also now a separate monopoly board file maker program that can create a new board file or edit an existing one. BFN Jim Kitchen's Inc, for games that are up to 100 percent funner to play. j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
I agree with you, dark. Always wanted to make him pay for the crimes against accessibility! Lol. -Original Message- From: gamers-boun...@audyssey.org [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of dark Sent: 15 March 2012 00:16 To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Hi tom. that all sounds pretty dire, I especially ahte the sound of the columnized views, but we'll see. Once again though this is the trend of having information all on screen rather than accessible through separate areas. i hope myself there will be the opportunity to put it into lists or some other change to stop it looking as stupid, and whoever thought of ribbons needs hanging on the end of one and punching for several days Imho. yes, I am biased I freely admit, but ribbons just annoy me, sinse they are so damn illogical. hopefully though sinse windows 7's lack of customizability in the interface was a major turn off microsoft will actually listen on this one and offer some alternatives, but we'll have to see. Otherwise I might be heading off to find bill gates with a very big hammer, though I suspect I'll have to wait in the kew, sinse I imagine lots of people are looking for bill gates with very big hammers :d. hay bill, like windows? maybe your head needs a new context window opening! let me pin this to your task bar! :d. Beware the Grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 11:58 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly 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. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
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. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Thomas, I have a question. I also read a test report for the latest version of Windows 8. It was made by a sighted user and he called the new desktop and start menu Metro. Windows 8 apparently has two versions of Internet Explorer and Metro has its own app store like Apple has. But I also read that the classic desktop (whatever is left of it) can be launched as another app. Two versions of IE are present, one included in Metro and another stand alone version like IE 8 or IE 9 currently are. They do not share data with each other like settings, session data, chache and other data. Now I'd like to know a few accessibility things. Are we talking about build in screen reader support for Metro, or the classic desktop? And what exactly is the new SAPI version and what kind of voices might come with it? And is this somehow related to the separately released Microsoft Speech Platform (or whatever its correct name is)? --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Michael, Well, one of the major reasons why Windows comes with Narrator, Mac OS with Voiceover, and Linux with Orca has to do with Section 508. In 2001 the U.S. American Disabilities Act, ADA, was amended so that all software purchased by or used by the U.S. government had to meet certain accessibility standards. Soon after George Bush Jr. signed Section 508 into law several small to large software companies began developing access technologies in order to meet Section 508 compliance. Although, Windows was the closest to meeting the requirements Microsoft began expanding the number of applications for Windows that would aid in accessibility. Out of that came Narrator, Microsoft Speech Recognition, and Microsoft Magnifier. Certainly Zoomtext, Jaws, or Dragon were far more advanced than what Microsoft was offering, but they had to include those features to the OS to meet Section 508 compliance. Apple quickly followed suit with their own Section 508 program. They hired developers who worked on screen readers to build Voiceover, and completely updated Cocoa so that new apps using Cocoa would automatically be accessible out of the box. Even better by Mac OS 10.4 you could even install the entire OS from start to finish using Voiceover which is still something you can't do with Windows, but because Apple took a different approach to accessibility, by centralizing it, Apple's accessibility has quickly caught up with Windows and even passed it in certain areas. Besides the top two companies smaller companies like Sun got into the act as well. Sun hired a company from Germany to create a cross-platform screen reader for Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD called /Gnopernicus. In addition they paid developers to write a totally new accessibility framework for Gnome which continues to this day. After a couple of years Gnopernicus was dropped in favor of a newer screen reader written in Python called Orca, and more and more open source developers have consistently attempted to spend time on making their apps Section 508 compliant for Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. For example, KDE, which is another GUI for Linux, has been working on accessibility for the last couple of years. Right now they have created an API called qt-at-spi which acts as a bridge between any Qt application for KDE and at-spi, which in turn passes the information to Orca. All of this effort is do to Section 508 which passed 11 years ago, and has been driving accessibility of software ever since. As far as TTS goes that's a separate issue. There are several non-accessibility related applications for TTS voices that has nothing to do with Section 508, screen readers, or the uses we tend to use them for. For example, Nextup has a couple of apps for Windows such as News Aloud and Weather Aloud. The former reads the current news and the other speaks the current weather. While they are accessible to us they were not created or marketed for the blind community but for business men who want to just listen to the news or weather without having to sit down and read it. Speech output can be just as helpful to them as us in cases like that. Another use of TTS is telephone applications. If a person calls into an automatic billing department they might be greeted by a program using a Sapi voice that tells them to press 1 for English and 2 for Spanish. Then, ask him/her for their billing number. It reads the current billing number and asks if it is correct etc. It might then ask him/her if they want to make a payment and so on. Basically, this is a technology that has evolved independent of us and just because you hear a TTS voice at your local teller machine doesn't always mean its there because of us. Its often being driven by mainstream marketing trends. Which brings me to my final point. While there are definitely six billion people in the world and its expected to double over the next century the fact of the matter is blindness is less than one percent of the population. Then, when you divide that one percent up into groups like the elderly who often live in assisted living conditions to begin with and young men and women in our age range we end up with a very very small group who use computers, smart phones, DVD players, etc. When you face the facts you and I are are in a very small group who don't have the kind of numbers to make it financially viable for certain products to be made accessible. Cheers! On 3/14/2012 7:30 PM, Michael Gauler wrote: Ok, let's think about this the other way around: Then if it is not in the companies interest to make DVD players or other devices accessible due to financial reasons, why does Windows have Narrator and Mac got VoiceOver included into the operating systems? If it is (theoretically) not a good idea because you won't make money with it? And while we are talking about market size. There are somewhere over six billion people on earth. How many
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
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. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Tom. Interesting about section 5.08. As I've said before disabled access is always something I think the us government, along with other countries like Scandinavia and the netherlands does far better than the Uk, sinse I've found nothing about software access in any of the British acts of parliament that deal with disability such as the disability discrimination act. Indeed my mum has to have a reader provided by the health service sinse the system they employ, despite being a department of the British government is completely inaccessible to screen readers (it was assessed by several experts and judged as such). While provision exists for agencies to perchice equipment for disabled students, this is pretty much farmed out to councels and thus what any given student gets, how willing a local councel is to help with education etc can very much vary from county to county. I will say as well though, this makes me a great deal more enthusiastic about the work i'm doing with my thesis, sinse one of the basic tennits I'm arguing is that disability is not a descrete catagory which a person is or is not, such as genda, nationality etc, but a relation betwene a person, his/her biological capacity, freedom of desires and environment which will affect everyone at some point, to a lesser or greater degree throughout life, and as such is a far more universal matter for a government to considder. Of course, whether anyone takes any notice will be another matter entirely :D. Beware the grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Dark, Grin. I think you hit the nail on the head so to speak. Your friend and I are quite a lot alike because that's actually one of the reasons why I became interested in programming. I get a satisfaction from being given a task, and then trying to create that piece of software from scratch and seeing the results of my work becoming reality. Its for that reason I often create experimental programs for myself just to see if I can figure out how to make the computer do something, and it challenges me to learn new things along the way. Not only does it make me a better programmer there are often benefits to writing custom programs for my computer. For example, writing SQL databases and then writing a GUI for it is about as boring as you can get. Yet if I create a database to keep track of my music collection it is both fun and satisfying because there is a purpose to the madness. Once I add all my music discs to the database I could look up a song like Magic Man by Heart and have a nice little report come back that it is on Dreamboat Annie (1976), Heart Greatest Hits Vol 1 (1994), These Dreams (1996), Heart Essentials (2004), etc. Figuring out how to create that program gives me as much satisfaction as being able to use it. As you probably have guessed by now its not just programming that gets me excited. A lot of times beta testing new operating systems, software, etc is often like Christmas come early. I can't tell you why, but I really enjoy playing with new software and seeing what it can do. Even if it doesn't offer me anything really new in terms of actual benefits I enjoy trying it out. For example, Microsoft just released the Windows 8 consumer beta just a few days ago. I litterally downloaded it and installed it on a machine practically the minute it was released. I was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning to get it and try it out. To put NVDA on it, and explore the new user interface firsthand. In terms of advantages I don't really see it as having a lot of advantages for me over Windows 7. About the only thing I found with Windows 8 that might be a reason to upgrade is startup and shutdown times are much much faster than Windows 7, and it seems to use less ram. Both are good things, but to quote your own reasons for not upgrading it won't help me play movies, listen to mp3s, check my e-mails, etc any better than I do on Windows 7. However, all of that is beside the point to me. What has me excited is simply that Windows 8 is new. It has a radically new user interface, new hot keys to learn, and I guess I just like the ability to explore it. To wander around the new user interface finding out what has changed, what new apps are available, what new features there are, and see what I can do with it. Rather than thinking of it as a tool I guess I think of it more like a toy that gives me pleasure simply by playing around with it. As an end user I think the new start menu screen is terrible. They have all these program groups tiled in columns and rows across the screen which is not intuitive for a blind user at all. I'll be the first to say it sucks. However, its a trend thanks to smart phones, and if I am going to stay in the technical support and software development field its something I'll have to know how to use in order to keep up with my sighted peers. So its a learning experience as much as having fun playing around with the OS. Of course, I have an advantage over many blind computer users and that is that Windows isn't my primary OS anyway. I use Linux for most of my day today computing so even if I get Windows 8 my personal interaction with it will probably be limited to games, software development, and/or using it to help people in my area troubleshoot problems with their new Windows 8 PCs. Regardless of what Microsoft does with the UI it won't impact me as much as someone who uses Windos exclusively because Windows is a secondary OS for me. To be honest Windows Vista is what pushed me towards Linux in the first place. I had used Linux on a part time up until Vista came out, but thanks to changes in the UI, a product activation, etc I began using Linux full time and found out I liked it better. One reason is that Linux has a lot more customization than Windows that allows me to configure the OS to suit my needs and likes rather than being stuck with whatever interface Microsoft has decided to force upon their customers. It is things like Windos 8 where we have a totally visual interface with no ability to use a classic Windows interface that makes me more likely to use Linux as my primary OS. For example, when I installed the Ubuntu 12 beta I was not happy with the latest version of Unity at all. Besides the broken accessibility which is being worked on right now Unity has a lot of stuff on the main screen with a launcher bar docked to one side of the screen and a menu bar running across the top
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Dark, Lol! Sorry, so far no dice. The copy of the consumer beta of Windows 8 I have here does not let you customize the interface too much. Right now what you see is what you get. Its kind of funny but if you listen to the GW Micro podcast of Windows 8 and Window-Eyes someone in the audience asked if someone would be creating something like Classic Shell to revert Windows 8 back to the classic Windows look and feel. Of course, Dug and Jeremy didn't know, but GW Micro's position is that they are not going to do anything like that themselves as they feel that a blind user should get familiar with the new look and feel in order to be productive in the job market which I agree with. In my opinion frankly speaking blind users have been spoiled for far too long. When Windows XP came out the Jaws tutorial Freedom Scientific told them to turn off the new start menu and revert everything back to the classic look and feel. That's fine and dandy as far as accessibility goes, but at the same time they are not learning to use the computer in the way a sighted user uses it, and have become use to having that feature available. Now, that Windows 8 is in beta and any hope of a classic user interface is pretty much non-existent its going to present blind users with a huge learning curve they can't overcome simply by turning off feature x they don't like. That said, I don't think the situation is as dire as it could be. Yes, the new start menu sucks, but there are plenty of workarounds that don't even require using the start menu. I can press Windows+r, type Notepad, and it will pop up without having to screw around with the start menu screen. I can also use the search screen, Windows+f, to act as another run command to find icons for programs and apps as well. I can go into the start menu and assign hot keys to all the icons I want to which means I can launch most programs without having to use the search screen, run command, or start menu. Finally, there is the option to pin apps to the taskbar so I don't even have to leave the desktop to get most stuff done. So its not as dire a situation as it could be. Its simply another case of finding new ways to do the same thing. Cheers! On 3/14/2012 8:15 PM, dark wrote: Hi tom. that all sounds pretty dire, I especially ahte the sound of the columnized views, but we'll see. Once again though this is the trend of having information all on screen rather than accessible through separate areas. i hope myself there will be the opportunity to put it into lists or some other change to stop it looking as stupid, and whoever thought of ribbons needs hanging on the end of one and punching for several days Imho. yes, I am biased I freely admit, but ribbons just annoy me, sinse they are so damn illogical. hopefully though sinse windows 7's lack of customizability in the interface was a major turn off microsoft will actually listen on this one and offer some alternatives, but we'll have to see. Otherwise I might be heading off to find bill gates with a very big hammer, though I suspect I'll have to wait in the kew, sinse I imagine lots of people are looking for bill gates with very big hammers :d. hay bill, like windows? maybe your head needs a new context window opening! let me pin this to your task bar! :d. Beware the Grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Tom. that's bad news in my book. I'm afraid I strongly disagree on your statement of a blind user getting used to the way sighted users do things for purpose of accessibility simply on the basis of the deffinition of access. It would be possible for a paraplegic to get out of his/her wheel chair and drag themselves up a flight of stairs on their hands. We don't however say Get used to doing this because it's what normally walking people do simply because we recognize that the amount of effort involved to the paraplegic in such an undertaking is wildly unreasonable. I'd apply the same principle here. Accessibility is not just being able to do x or y, it's do with equal effort. For a sighted user, having a maximal range of information in the one location provides less effort sinse they can use the mouse to click it after a visual overview. This is not true for a blind user, and there is absolutely no reason why they should! from an access perspective get used to anything. myself, sinse I regard computers simply as tools, I'd be in favour of any and all work arounds to make the blind users' use of a computer as easy as the sighted users, ie, requiring same amounts of effort. if this involves redesigning the interface, turning off features x y z, so be it. As to the job markit, well once again there is a principle from my thesis. Just as it would be unreasonable to expect a sighted based business to go over entirely to braille, it would be equally unreasonable to expect a blind employee to use software that took significantly more effort. This requires a level of compitance from both the blind user, and indeed the employer in coming to an understanding that best serves the needs of the blind user wcompromising ithout the employer. This is why in my thesis I advocate an independent body be setup to oversee disability related debates in employment and leasure who have skills and knolidge of disability, but have no vested interest either way. In the absense of such a body though, I'm inclined simply to say stick it, the effort needs to be equalized especially given the current impossibility of anyone disabled getting a job at all anyway. Beware the Grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Dark, While equal effort access might be a laudable ideal goal, don't forget that all companies are subject to economies of scale, and that blind users are a very small percentage. It's going to cost less per user to focus on the 99% non-blind users than the 1% blind, and there's pretty much nothing that can be done about it. It's simply a law of economics and production. There are only two ways to fund higher proportional spending for minority production: subsidize it using majority production, or sell the minority independently for a higher price. Personally, I'm willing to pay a bit more to support minority interfaces like screen readers and command line access, largely because I use them; but like everyone else, there is a limit on what I'm willing to pay, and for most people that limit is substantially lower than mine. Dennis Towne Alter Aeon MUD http://www.alteraeon.com On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 8:54 AM, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi Tom. that's bad news in my book. I'm afraid I strongly disagree on your statement of a blind user getting used to the way sighted users do things for purpose of accessibility simply on the basis of the deffinition of access. It would be possible for a paraplegic to get out of his/her wheel chair and drag themselves up a flight of stairs on their hands. We don't however say Get used to doing this because it's what normally walking people do simply because we recognize that the amount of effort involved to the paraplegic in such an undertaking is wildly unreasonable. I'd apply the same principle here. Accessibility is not just being able to do x or y, it's do with equal effort. For a sighted user, having a maximal range of information in the one location provides less effort sinse they can use the mouse to click it after a visual overview. This is not true for a blind user, and there is absolutely no reason why they should! from an access perspective get used to anything. myself, sinse I regard computers simply as tools, I'd be in favour of any and all work arounds to make the blind users' use of a computer as easy as the sighted users, ie, requiring same amounts of effort. if this involves redesigning the interface, turning off features x y z, so be it. As to the job markit, well once again there is a principle from my thesis. Just as it would be unreasonable to expect a sighted based business to go over entirely to braille, it would be equally unreasonable to expect a blind employee to use software that took significantly more effort. This requires a level of compitance from both the blind user, and indeed the employer in coming to an understanding that best serves the needs of the blind user wcompromising ithout the employer. This is why in my thesis I advocate an independent body be setup to oversee disability related debates in employment and leasure who have skills and knolidge of disability, but have no vested interest either way. In the absense of such a body though, I'm inclined simply to say stick it, the effort needs to be equalized especially given the current impossibility of anyone disabled getting a job at all anyway. Beware the Grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Denis. that makes distinct economic sense, however remember when we're dealing with disability we've gone beyond the realms of economics. As Tom said earlier, thanks to Us law, access has to be a component in governmental systems. So long as you have a belief that there is a principle that overrides prophit, the prophit arguement alone doesn't stand. just as we have labour laws, and (in the Uk anyway), laws about national health which are socially motivated rather than purely based on capitalistic principles, so is the idea of effort and equal access, indeed Tom illustrated this earlier with the us law requiring software access. Of course this isn't to say the world should bend over backwards, indeed that's one of the main pricniples of my thesis, merely though that if you are going to considder disability it should be considdered not as a minority group access, but as access to a condition which will affect most people at some point to some degree. Beware the Grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
This might be the case, but why should be the new interface be better than the old one? I have seen a lot of XP computers where sighted people were working at a time before Windows 7 and not everyone of said sighted persons found the new start menu of XP better than the old one. I also heard several sighted people say that ribbons were not their prefered way of using their Office products. In not all cases, but a few, there was the opinion that functionality is more important than the question whether an element of an interface is located in the top left corner of the screen or the bottom right corner... And because the mobile phone has a different interface, the computer needs it to, is not an argument for me. And this is because a computer or even a netbook is not a mobile phone. Yes, it is surely not bad if a new computer has multi Touch capable hardware, then why shouldn't be there software for said purpose. But because there are touchscreens does not mean that all mouses or keyboards are going to get destroyed this moment. I think it is not the best idea if we limit ourselves to just one method of doing things, when everyone should have the freedom to do things the way he or she likes best, as long, as it is not destroying your productivity (if we are not talking about end users)... --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Ok and how about MAC OS? Now you told us how you think about Windows and Linux. But where is MAC OS placed in this picture? --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
I have another question. If TTS is good for us and other business people who want to get something read to them, why can't I buy loquendo voices in an online store (regardless of the price), or several other voices like the Scansoft products? OK, nextup.com offers Scansoft voices for TextAloud and other programs, but even they do not have the new voices. But I know that German IPhone users with IOS 5 and later have the voice Anna on their devices. Even the non SAPI versions of RealSpeak Direct for JAWS doesn't have Anna. And this is not only about this one voice. There are new products and it seems that no one can buy them. Whether you have the money to do it seems to be not the matter here, but even I as an end user or a member of a company can buy products from Adobe via an online shop. If I would do so as an end user is not the question, but I could do so. But the question remains why it is so difficult to get some TTS related products or information on them. Back to accessibility, a few programs blind people use surely could also be used by people with other impairments. What about all the other people with special requirements appart from the blind? How are the numbers there? --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
I totally agree here. Doing things differently does not necessarily mean we are outdated or behind whatever some company makes trent... And I'd like to get a copy of this document you are working on as soon as it is finished. - Original Message - From: dark d...@xgam.org To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2012 1:54 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Hi Tom. that's bad news in my book. I'm afraid I strongly disagree on your statement of a blind user getting used to the way sighted users do things for purpose of accessibility simply on the basis of the deffinition of access. It would be possible for a paraplegic to get out of his/her wheel chair and drag themselves up a flight of stairs on their hands. We don't however say Get used to doing this because it's what normally walking people do simply because we recognize that the amount of effort involved to the paraplegic in such an undertaking is wildly unreasonable. I'd apply the same principle here. Accessibility is not just being able to do x or y, it's do with equal effort. For a sighted user, having a maximal range of information in the one location provides less effort sinse they can use the mouse to click it after a visual overview. This is not true for a blind user, and there is absolutely no reason why they should! from an access perspective get used to anything. myself, sinse I regard computers simply as tools, I'd be in favour of any and all work arounds to make the blind users' use of a computer as easy as the sighted users, ie, requiring same amounts of effort. if this involves redesigning the interface, turning off features x y z, so be it. As to the job markit, well once again there is a principle from my thesis. Just as it would be unreasonable to expect a sighted based business to go over entirely to braille, it would be equally unreasonable to expect a blind employee to use software that took significantly more effort. This requires a level of compitance from both the blind user, and indeed the employer in coming to an understanding that best serves the needs of the blind user wcompromising ithout the employer. This is why in my thesis I advocate an independent body be setup to oversee disability related debates in employment and leasure who have skills and knolidge of disability, but have no vested interest either way. In the absense of such a body though, I'm inclined simply to say stick it, the effort needs to be equalized especially given the current impossibility of anyone disabled getting a job at all anyway. Beware the Grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Dennis, right. I think what is hard for people who are not in business, who are not programmers, etc to understand is that older products like XP are no longer making Microsoft money. They released it in 2001 and was selling it up until 2010 or so. After a certain point they sold as many copies of XP as they could, and now they have to make money by creating newer operating systems like Vista, Win 7, and Win 8. The only way to sell those newer operating systems is to add new features, make changes to the user interface, etc that are not available in prior products. What Dark and others fail to realize is simply this. How does Microsoft continue to maintain Windows XP if the operating system is no longer making them money? How do they compete with Linux and Mac OS if they never change and build new interfaces etc similar to their competition? Plus as you said even though change doesn't seem very beneficial there usually are advantages to upgrading. They might not be obvious at first, but they are there if a person looks for them. For example, one feature in Win 7 I really like is the ability to pin apps to the taskbar. I can press win+1 through win+0 to open the apps from the taskbar directly and if the app is already open, say window 1, I can press win+1 to jump immediately to that window without having to alt+tab through all the open windows. Its nice and handy and once I got use to it I find older versions of Windows like XP lacking in features I've come to expect to have. Its easy to say I don't need this or that feature but once a user comes to use them a lot, to rely on them being there, XP doesn't seem that fantastic in the final analysis. At least that's been my experience. Of course, I'm looking at this from the point of a convert rather than someone who is happy and satisfied with the status quo. Cheers! On 3/13/2012 5:24 PM, Dennis Towne wrote: As a programmer and developer, I understand completely why Microsoft (or any developer for that matter) would want to discontinue an older product. Maintenance is expensive and irritating. Keep in mind that if they simply try to continue XP (and every other product that some minority group prefers), they will lose money. If they go broke, there are no more products. How do you think MS pays for XP maintenance right now? They do it with sales of products that make money. XP doesn't make money anymore, and they couldn't make it pay for itself if they tried. I've had similar complaints come up on Alter Aeon - why don't I just make ltypes 0 and 1 optional, why don't I just make PPK optional, why don't I bring up separate servers that allow multiplaying, etc. If I tried to do even a fraction of these things, AA would never progress because I'd be spending all my time maintaining crap that doesn't actually make the game any better. All developers have to pick and choose their battles. Microsoft is no different. I know it may be irritating to have to change your ways or learn new things, but the fact of the matter is that we can't all be expecting windows 3.1 (or whatever your favorite version is) to work the same way for the next 20 years. Change happens. It may not seem like it, but usually, it actually is for the better. Dennis Towne Alter Aeon MUD http://www.alteraeon.com --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Shaun, That's correct. Windows 8 now uses UI Automation which has drastically improved accessibility and has pretty much done away with the video intercept drivers we've seen on prior versions of Windows. So access is actually improving under Windows 8 not getting less accessible. Cheers! On 3/13/2012 7:02 PM, shaun everiss wrote: well a gwmicro win eyes csun review has win8 going to uia more meaning no drivers are required. Ofcause if ms had done this before we relied on sapi, mssa and a whole bunch of other libs for access it would be ok. It sounds like though ti will be better for everyone, however why they made us use all that junk if it was going to be put in a few years into 1 library thats the issue. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Shaun, Hard to say, but the audio games industry will probably have to change just like everything else. I can't say when, but the way hand-held devices like the iPhones and Droid phones are selling we could do well, as audio gamers, to think about targeting those devices as more and more blind users have them. Even Windows 8 is a different ball of wax for a number of reasons and I highly recommend people learn Microsoft's .NET languages because that is now the standard development platform and tools for Windows 8. However, weather audio game developers will do that or not is probably asking too much of them. Cheers! On 3/13/2012 7:07 PM, shaun everiss wrote: Well tom I aggree with you, except for one ms has shown they don't or won't want to put accessability in a phone. If what you say is true, then in a few years or so we will all run android os on our pcs and I look foreward to that day!! Windows touch will not be as accessable as other tablet oses like iphone or android. ANd until it is we will have to be annoyed by it not being so. Saying that, I have a friend in the education industry and it seems its going back to 34 grand braille note tablets running windows ce so maybe if it ever dropps as you say we will be carrying round several of those gismos. I wander what that will do to the existing audiogames industry. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Michael, Actually, we are very close to the full voice input and voice output type system you are talking about. For the last few Windows versions Microsoft has included speech recognition software as well as the Narrator screen reader. From what I've seen of the Windows 8 versions Narrator has become a lot better than prior versions, is more like Apple's Voiceover, and the speech recognition in Win 8 is much improved as well. I still think Dragon is better than Microsoft Speech Recognition, but for a free voice input software its pretty decent. As to your point about high definition I don't think anyone actually uses their cell phone or tablet for that kind of thing. Remember there are alternative devices for that such as 80 inch flat screen plasma displays and blue ray DVD players for watching movies and high definition video. Who needs a computer when they can have a home theater like that. Same goes for playing games. Truth is that the XBox 360, Play Station III, Wii, etc is where the major game market is right now. Yes, there are still PC games being made, but a lot of the gamers I know don't use their PC so much for games. Instead they use their XBox, connect it to a high definition flat screen TV, and on a 60 inch flat screen TV its much better than on a 20 inch monitor. Bottom line, my point is there are alternatives to the PC already. You are still thinking in terms of the PC being an all in one device, but that's changing as newer and better alternatives appear. cheers! On 3/13/2012 7:55 PM, Michael Gauler wrote: All of this might be true... But I have several questions. If mobile devices and new technologies are created and let's say touchscreens are so great, why not take it up another level and finally create a computer system like the fictional LCARS from Star Trek, where you have instant access to your data and where you have the option of full real time interactive voice control plus voice output of everything? Surely voice input and output shouldn't be desired by blind users in the world alone, it could be adapted for everyone. And the other thing I am wondering about is the usage of mobile devices in general. I was born blind and could never see, nor do I currently have a device like an IPhone... But I'd like to ask anyone who could see at some point in their life to tell me why watching some HD videos on super small mobile displays or playing complex and graphically intensive games with said small devices instead of using more stationary devices and large screens capable of handling digital HD media? I can understand why people would like to have more functions in small devices. But things like listening to music with more than two speakers like 5.1 or 7.1 audio systems or watching high resolution movies and such surely should remain on the currently needed technology instead of being ported to small devices unless you can adapt them as well to handle all this. I don't know what the processing capabilities of android phones are or what said capabilities are for other mobile devices, but I doubt that they are really better than current high tech computing equipment and the big computer networks and super computers. Surely, there is still time for such developments, but the question remains who does set such trents and can companies like Microsoft influence or stop such trents, because Microsoft is not small and should have considerable power, so it could be asked if Microsoft must adapt, or could Microsoft force others to adapt to whatever they create. Besides, why do we or companies have to follow and copy whatever someone makes before us? This discussion of user interfaces (Office 2003 vs 2007 design for example) is pointless in my opinion. I personally don't have problems with the idea of changing the design of a program. But we do we have to be forced to a design. Let's take the Office 2007 design for an example. I have read several reports and posts in various forums (sighted users) where people were not happy with the new design not because they had to learn new things, but because they did not have a choice in the matter meaning that everyone who got the new Office for whatever reason had to use the new design. But what I never got in this talk was, why Microsoft did not offer two designs? Look at Windows Media Player or Winamp. Both programs have skins which you can download or create yourself to alter and customice the interface of your program. But why don't more programs have the option for skins (surely it can't be because they want to make money, because you could theoretically sell anything you develop). So, what is the problem with the talks of designs and user feedback companies are getting and seemingly ignore here and there sometimes? --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Michael, Simple. by adopting a universal interface, universal look and feel, a developer will reduce complexity and the time it takes to learn the software. The Basic principle behind the new user interfaces is that if a customer learns an interface and a developer of a different product has a similar interface the customer will be able to use the new product with very little effort. That's why there is a drive to move to the more touchscreen type user interfaces, and have a more universal look and feel between desktop software and hand-held software. In addition, to that the way we are heading the software that runs on your PC may also be the same software running on your next generation cell phone, tablet, PDA, etc. So adopting a universal user interface in advance will help customers switch back and forth from their hand-held device and their PC. For example, I recently asked someone from Ubuntu why they decided to use Unity instead of Gnome. The answer I got back is that its part of their marketing strategy. In addition to Del building desktops, laptops, and netbooks with Ubuntu preloaded on them Cononical apparently has a deal going where Ubuntu will be embedded in several hand-held devices like tablets and smart phones requiring a newer interface for touchscreens etc. All this make sense considering that if I have Ubuntu on a PC and have a smart phone, tablet, etc I'd certainly want the user interface to be the same rather than having to learn two different user interfaces for the same OS. Cheers! On 3/13/2012 7:59 PM, Michael Gauler wrote: And wwhere are the still existing computer or netbook and laptop users whoose hardware doesn't have touchscreen capabilities? Do they think at all? Surely, android might look nice, but what is more important, the look or the functionality? And who exactly thinks that the visual design of Android or IOS is cool? And moreover, Android and IOS devices are not exactly like a desktop computer, so why should a desktop computer have the interface of another device in the first place? Why must it all be alike? --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Dark, Alright, but here is where your argument actually falls apart. If you want to talk about access on Windows 8 I can say access has actually improved. There are a number of areas where access has actually increased and not decreased in Windows, and is well worth noting. First, UI automation. In Windows 8 Microsoft has been deprecating a number of access technologies like MSAA in favor of UI Automation. Its a huge improvement over MSAA, is now a standard part of the Windows API, and any application designed with UI Automation in mind should be accessible without video intercept drivers, scripts, and any of the other crap screen readers have had to use to make prior versions of Windows applications accessible. Second, Windows Narrator has been drastically improved under Windows 8. It looks to me like Microsoft has basically copied Apple's Voiceover screen reader which is not a bad thing. Narrator is far more functional as a screen reader in Windows 8 than prior versions, and thanks to UI Automation any app using it will be accessible to Narrator out of the box. Third, MS Sapi 5.5 is an improvement over earlier versions. Windows 8 now has some new voices available and they blow away Mike, Mary, and Sam found in XP. Even Microsoft Anna which first appeared in Vista was an improvement. Fourth, Microsoft Speech Recognition. Its perhaps not as good as say Dragon Naturally Speaking, but from beta testing the new version the recognition engine is better than prior versions too. So both people with mobility and visual impairments can take advantage of voice input under Windows 8 if they want to. Finally, touchscreen technology is making huge access improvements for people with mobility impairments. All they have to do is point to the screen, and tap the icon they want a couple of times to open it up. This is often easier than using a mouse, trackball, touchpad, etc as a person can interact with Windows 8 with a single finger. Bottom line, if you want to make the case that more and more effort is required to gain equal access to Windows I don't think it really holds a lot of water. From what I've seen of Win 8 so far the opposite is true. Less effort is required because the access technology present is superior to anything else Microsoft has released to date. Cheers! On 3/13/2012 8:28 PM, dark wrote: Hi Dennis. the problem is this isn't about learning new things or preferring older systems, this is about access. As per my phd thesis, access = equal, or as close to equal as possible amounts of effort betwene groups with different biological limitations, and whatever way you cut the cookie, more and more effort is having to be expanded with the newer trends in Ui microsoft are implementing. It's rather like a building being rennivated and putting in escalators while wripping up the old ramps that paraplegics could use to enter. It is true that there is little to know prophet in access, however if we followed that line of thinking to it's ultimate conclusion, very little would be accessible. Access is an ethical matter and as such falls outside te of the basic tennits of capitalism, and this is why we can cryticise microsoft mainstream game companies etc, for following prophet only rather than access measures (indeed this is where Carl marx was exactly right in noting that the persuit of prophit is itself an amoral motivation, not an ethical one). plus I might add that saving money seems a pretty feeble excuse for the worlds richest coorporation which is paying most of it's manual workers in china and tyland a pittance. Beware the grue! dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Tom. Well the upgreading part, I'll have to considder, but I think I would be very wary of upgrading simply! to upgrade, or simply because I had to, that's why i'd like some bennifits. I take your point about laptops, however I am still not convinced, for those who use desktop pcs as a general media system as indeed myself, many of my friends and my brother do, sinse that's something where you need! a larger unit that has a full sized keyboard, can connect to a really good quality monitor, set of 5.1 speakers etc. Btw, as for what I do when this laptop breaks, the answer is probably change for an Iphone, sinse while I still want windows on a desktop, there are lots of portable things I'd want an Ios device to do, and indeed several Ios things and games I'd want specifically. So I think i'd opt for either an Iphone or an Ipad rather than a laptop. Beware the grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 5:15 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Hi Dark, Well, like I've said before there isn't much use in upgrading if it doesn't offer anything new for you personally. However, I am someone who likes to be on the bleeding edge, try new things, and I've always enjoyed staying up to date when and where possible. So that's largely where I'm coming from. Although, upgrading isn't necessarily always better for everyone, and we all have different preferences. I realize that as much as the next guy. My basic point isn't that you need to upgrade, or that you shouldn't use your own preferences in upgrading. Obviously, you should do what works for you at the moment, but you should be prepared to change if and when it becomes a necessity. For example, you've got a laptop running XP, it does everything you want it to do, so don't need to upgrade right now. However, lets say you have some serious hardware failure and that laptop dies. What will you do? Will you go on Ebay and buy a used laptop just to get another XP machine, or will you go to your favorite computer store and buy a new laptop with Win 7? The point being that change is inevitable. Yeah, there may not be a pressing need to upgrade right now, and you might not have to for several years. Sooner or later you'll probably have to buy a new laptop or desktop running Windows 7, Windows 8, or later on it to replace your older hardware and software. That's basically all I'm saying. As far as your opinion that desktops will stay and laptops will be a thing of the past in favor of hand-helds I personally disagree. One reason for that is that netbooks are very popular right now. Last year more netbooks were sold than desktops, and for good reason. They are smaller, lighter, more portible and more like the hand-held devices like tablet PCs I was talking about. Plus most laptops are as good as their desktop counterparts. For example, I got a Toshiba last October. Even though this isn't a high-end model it has a full sized keyboard, 17 inch display, DVD reader/writer, a duel core 2 GHZ 64-bit processor, 3 GB of ram, a 3d graphics card, etc. Basically, its specs are similar to the average desktop available at the same time I purchased my laptop. Plus the price on laptops have come way down and aren't any more than a desktop PC. So when I look at it I'm not at all sure the average consumer is willing to go out and buy a desktop PC when a laptop can do the same thing, costs about the same, and is smaller and easier to store. As you know I often do tech support on the side and what I've been seeing is mostly laptops for the last couple of years. Desktop sales have fallen here in the united states and I think the figures pretty much speak for themselves that desktops are more likely to be a thing of the past before laptops and netbooks. As a matter of fact I just helped a neighbor with her new laptop a couple of weeks ago. She got a new H.P. laptop and wireless printer and I had to help her get her printer working. As we were working I made a comment to the effect her new laptop was really light. She replied that she use to have one of those big desktops, it was too big for her apartment, so her and her husband decided to buy a small computer so she could put it away when she wasn't using it. She likes her laptop a lot better than the big desktop. Since my apartment is small, and I don't have room for a desktop either obviously size really does matter in certain cases. More and more people like this neighbor and myself are using laptops because we don't have to deal with a tower, big monitor, external keyboard, mouse, scanner, printer, etc all sitting on a desk taking up room. A laptop is very compact with the keyboard, mouse, and monitor all in one, and can be folded up and stored in a desk drawer when not being used. Like hand-helds laptops are more convenient than
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
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. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 7:34 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Hi Dark, Alright, but here is where your argument actually falls apart. If you want to talk about access on Windows 8 I can say access has actually improved. There are a number of areas where access has actually increased and not decreased in Windows, and is well worth noting. First, UI automation. In Windows 8 Microsoft has been deprecating a number of access technologies like MSAA in favor of UI Automation. Its a huge improvement over MSAA, is now a standard part of the Windows API, and any application designed with UI Automation in mind should be accessible without video intercept drivers, scripts, and any of the other crap screen readers have had to use to make prior versions of Windows applications accessible. Second, Windows Narrator has been drastically improved under Windows 8. It looks to me like Microsoft has basically copied Apple's Voiceover screen reader which is not a bad thing. Narrator is far more functional as a screen reader in Windows 8 than prior versions, and thanks to UI Automation any app using it will be accessible to Narrator out of the box. Third, MS Sapi 5.5 is an improvement over earlier versions. Windows 8 now has some new voices available and they blow away Mike, Mary, and Sam found in XP. Even Microsoft Anna which first appeared in Vista was an improvement. Fourth, Microsoft Speech Recognition. Its perhaps not as good as say Dragon Naturally Speaking, but from beta testing the new version the recognition engine is better than prior versions too. So both people with mobility and visual impairments can take advantage of voice input under Windows 8 if they want to. Finally, touchscreen technology is making huge access improvements for people with mobility impairments. All they have to do is point to the screen, and tap the icon they want a couple of times to open it up. This is often easier than using a mouse, trackball, touchpad, etc as a person can interact with Windows 8 with a single finger. Bottom line, if you want to make the case that more and more effort is required to gain equal access to Windows I don't think it really holds a lot of water. From what I've seen of Win 8 so far the opposite is true. Less effort is required because the access technology present is superior to anything else Microsoft has released to date. Cheers! On 3/13/2012 8:28 PM, dark wrote: Hi Dennis. the problem is this isn't about learning new things or preferring older systems, this is about access. As per my phd thesis, access = equal, or as close to equal as possible amounts of effort betwene groups with different biological limitations, and whatever way you cut the cookie, more and more effort is having to be expanded with the newer trends in Ui microsoft are implementing. It's rather like a building being rennivated and putting in escalators while wripping up the old ramps that paraplegics could use to enter. It is true that there is little to know prophet in access, however if we followed that line of thinking to it's ultimate conclusion, very little would be accessible. Access is an ethical matter and as such falls outside te of the basic tennits of capitalism, and this is why we can cryticise microsoft mainstream game companies etc, for following prophet only rather than access measures (indeed this is where Carl marx was exactly right in noting that the persuit of prophit is itself an amoral motivation, not an ethical one). plus I might add that saving money seems a pretty feeble excuse for the worlds richest coorporation which is paying most of it's manual workers in china and tyland a pittance. Beware the grue! dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Dark, Sure. Again, it comes down to personal preference. Sometimes the benefits to upgrading aren't always that obvious or seem all that important at the time. For example, when Windows 7 came out I really wondered myself if I should invest in the upgrade. After all, I had a Compaq that was barely two years old running Windows Vista, and for all intents and purposes Windows 7 is just an updated version of Vista. So I was thinking what's the benefit in upgrading to Windows 7? Well, as it turned out there were several things that convinced me to upgrade. One, was the fact that Microsoft overhalled the OS, removed a bunch of older code, and Windows 7 boots much faster than Vista. Two, Windows 7 was more stable before the service packs were released than Vista was. Three, Microsoft removed a lot of apps from the base install such as Windows Mail and made them available through Windows update. The advantage here is if I use Thunderbird I don't have Windows Mail hanging around on my drive taking up space when I don't use it. Four, Windows 7 comes preinstalled with .NET 4.0 which will handle most .NET apps out of the box without having to update or install .NET components on the side. Finally, can handle Microsoft's new UI Automation framework which will improve over all access to software as it becomes more widely used by screen readers and Windows applications. So as you can see at least in my own personal situation there were some pretty clear benefits to upgrading to Windows 7. Everyone agrees that Vista was a pretty poor version of Windows, was a bad release, and Windows 7 was designed and marketed to correct issues in Vista. However, even for an XP user yourself there probably are some benefits to you that aren't immediately obvious or that I've failed to mention because a lot has changed since XP was released. As far as hand-held devices goes I've not decided on one for myself personally. I've looked at an Apple iPad and while I don't mind the user interface I'd want to write accessible games for the unit and unfortunately Microsoft's iOS is proprietary to the max. I'd rather get a Droid phone with Ice Cream Sandwich on it so I could write games and apps for it in Java. At least Google isn't quite as anal about proprietary languages and tools as Apple. Cheers! On 3/14/2012 4:14 AM, dark wrote: Hi Tom. Well the upgreading part, I'll have to considder, but I think I would be very wary of upgrading simply! to upgrade, or simply because I had to, that's why i'd like some bennifits. I take your point about laptops, however I am still not convinced, for those who use desktop pcs as a general media system as indeed myself, many of my friends and my brother do, sinse that's something where you need! a larger unit that has a full sized keyboard, can connect to a really good quality monitor, set of 5.1 speakers etc. Btw, as for what I do when this laptop breaks, the answer is probably change for an Iphone, sinse while I still want windows on a desktop, there are lots of portable things I'd want an Ios device to do, and indeed several Ios things and games I'd want specifically. So I think i'd opt for either an Iphone or an Ipad rather than a laptop. Beware the grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi tom. That makes sense, and if the choice was vista vs 7 i'd probably agree, however for me it's the compatibility issue that is the thing. For instance, While I've tried both windows live mail, microsoft outlook and thunderbird, nothing I thought was as good as outlook express. yes, they all came with more features, but seemed to take more navigation to access, for instance if I want a message to a contact in outlook express I just hit tab once from my inbox and bam, there is my contacts list as a dropdown. No mucking about with the address book or anything else. Does it do conferencing? multi user messages, threaded messages or the fancy stuff? no it doesn't, however when I write mail I don't particularly want any of that, I just want something that lets me read, reply, and write mails quickly and easily, and outlook express does that. Microsoft however have done their usual and in making the interface fancier for people with working eyeballs and adding billions of other functions, have overcomplicated the task of just writing, receiving and replying to E-mails. Of course, I'm fairly certain I could get used to using windows messenger or thunderbird, --- -but why should I? the new bennifits aren't things I'd use, and it'd just make what I do currently with outlook express more complex. The same goes for many other changes. It doesn't matter to me if windows 7 comes with the hooja flip new process speed 3000 upgrade of doom that makes it run 500 times faster and more securely if I can't actually play games, write mail and do the stuff I do on it. i think that's probably one of the key differences. For me, a windows is just a tool to do other stuff, I don't really care how well or badly the operating system works compared to other stuff around and on the markit, it just depends upon what it does for me personally. While from what you've described pinning to the taskbar sounds a good idea, and much of rht eannoyences with the interface can be bypassed, do I actually get to do anything new and fun with it? would it let me play more games, play music and audio brouse the net, watch films, do E-mail and write my thesis any better than I do at the second. The answer currently seems to be a distinct no, sinse most of the games that I play run equally well on windows xp, and indeed some like older 16 bit applications won't run on 7 at all without a virtual machine (though as I said apparently this is changing with windows 8). Word 2007 is actually easier to use than the upgraded versions, and winamp still works fine. About the only thing that would! make a difference is full 5.1 speaker support, and while I freely admit this would be a good thing, I don't know if it outways all the bad stuff as yet. Of course, this situation may change in the future. When lots of games come out that I can't run on xp, when a better mail client is available, perhaps when windows 8 actually has the 16 bit compatibility that will let me run fallthru, eamon etc, then is the point I'll considder upgrading. As for Ios, well sinse I haven't got into game developement yet, that's not as much a concern, and where as there aren't! many games that require windows 7, there is a lot of interesting stuff available for Ios that I haven't been able to play. I wouldn't want to go Ios totally, sinse there would be too many other things I couldn't do, my thesis for instance has to be written in ms word format sinse that's what the philosophy department use, but as long as I had a windows desktop, this wouldn't be an issue. I suppose this is ultimately a difference in thinking of computers. For me, a computer just takes the place of a lot of other devices, such as a games console (though I do still own my Snes and gamecube, I don't get new games on either), music system, typewriter and dvd player, and I'd only considder a computer to be good or bad relative to those functions, rather than having any intrinsic value in itself. Btw, a very amusing take on this are the new cybermen in Doctor who. Rather than the old cybermen being people who replaced first their bodies, then their brains with cybernetics for survival, now they are billed as human brains in steel boddies, created as the next upgrade, human 2.0, with bugs removed and far greater useability (to quote the actual episode rise of the cybermen). Indeed it was one of the producers stated aimes that the cybermen were almost a play off many people's desire to have the latest and best upgrade, as much as the function they filled in the old series of survival instinct gone mad. This is again why i like Dr. who, when it's done well it manages to make us take a look at ourselves in a really strange and twisted way. Beware the Grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
What I never got was the reason why screen readers had to use all the stuff like video intercept and got so little result in using it. If I can clone my graphics card virtually and the screen reader is controlling the clone, then why does a screen reader need external OCR to handle letters? Moreover, if I have access to the entire screen and all graphic information, shouldn't i (the program) be capable of reading nearly anything except for moving and continously morphing pictures out of the box, so that MS or others thechnically wouldn't need to create a second voiceOver for Windows? --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
If the desktop computer is not the all in one package, why do I hear people saying that the IPhone or other mobile devices are the all in one package, when it is obviously not true? And, if consoles like the play station 3 are running their own operating system with internet access and such, then there would be the question why theese parts of their interfaces don't have their own build in accessibility features. And what I also don't get is, why developers, be they mainstream or audio game ones do limit themselves to one market segment. It is true that devices like the IPhone are growing in popularity even for blind users. And because of this we have some accessible games for the blind for such devices, like Papa Sangre. But What I don't get is, why there isn't a version of Papa Sangre for Mac OS X, which is like IOS and shares several components with it. Or there could be a version for Windows or Linux. And from a capitalistic point of view, it wouldn't be a bad idea to target several platforms together to gain maximum profit. That's why I never got why several PS2 and PS1 games like all God of War, Darkstalkers or Naruto games were never released for the PC. In the times the first titles of each series were released, there was no IPhone and computers (namely desktop computers) were still more like the all in one device and had a bigger market. It also doesn't explain, why severa l console games do have expansions or extra content available via some download service, while several old and new PC games don't have such features. And then there is the case of games like Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light where we have a massive content difference between platforms... --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
hi Michael. As to why wii, ps3 online etc don't have access to their os, it's the same reason as nintendo, capcom, square, blizard etc don't make accessible games, the almighty prophet margin. While governments and institutions will buy pcs and screen readers for Vi users, thus creating at least some degree of prophet in access for those groups, the same is not true of consoles, and companies like nintendo aren't interested in minorities or indeed ethics. What may happen in the future when the generation who grew up in the 1970's playing atari games start to hit their 50's and lose their vision could be another story though. As to why more software isn't cross platform, well once again it's developement environment and cash. Direct x for instance is windows only, and a developer would need to pretty much redesign a direct x application from scratch to have it work on mac or lynux. Though cross platform libraries exist, they're not usually as good as the ones for the native system. Then of course is apple's less than fair practice of making developers pay! for the privelidge of writing softwware for their os, --- -a practice which deffinately discourages cross compatibility, sinse why should a developer pay! to work on mac, when they can do the same on lynux and/or windows for free. This really isn't a good practice and though it earns apple some money now probably won't encourage people to write for the system in the future. I'm not sure about the differences betwene mobile Ios and Mac, though I assume there are some major ones, indeed I don't know if you need separate dev licences for each system (it wouldn't indeed surprise me if you did given some of apples other less than generous decisions), but I'm not sure on that one. Beware the Grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Michael Gauler michael.gau...@gmx.de To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 1:49 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly If the desktop computer is not the all in one package, why do I hear people saying that the IPhone or other mobile devices are the all in one package, when it is obviously not true? And, if consoles like the play station 3 are running their own operating system with internet access and such, then there would be the question why theese parts of their interfaces don't have their own build in accessibility features. And what I also don't get is, why developers, be they mainstream or audio game ones do limit themselves to one market segment. It is true that devices like the IPhone are growing in popularity even for blind users. And because of this we have some accessible games for the blind for such devices, like Papa Sangre. But What I don't get is, why there isn't a version of Papa Sangre for Mac OS X, which is like IOS and shares several components with it. Or there could be a version for Windows or Linux. And from a capitalistic point of view, it wouldn't be a bad idea to target several platforms together to gain maximum profit. That's why I never got why several PS2 and PS1 games like all God of War, Darkstalkers or Naruto games were never released for the PC. In the times the first titles of each series were released, there was no IPhone and computers (namely desktop computers) were still more like the all in one device and had a bigger market. It also doesn't explain, why severa l console games do have expansions or extra content available via some download service, while several old and new PC games don't have such features. And then there is the case of games like Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light where we have a massive content difference between platforms... --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Dark, I am not familiar with MAC OS or IOS. But what I last heard was that you need to run MAC OS to compile IOS apps. I am not sure if that's still the case, but that was what I last heard. And the question about operating system access is not only about blind users. Somewhere I once read that you could install and run a linux distribution on the Play Station 3, but this feature was removed and without serious hacking, you can't do it right now. Yes, you are probably right that the PS3 doesn't have DirectX. But since I am not a developer of console games, I do not know if the PS3 has their own directX or at least something like it. So, we don't know what you would officially require to develop console games appart from licenses of course. And what about the xbox 360? It is a device developed by Microsoft, but because I don't have it, I can't know how games are developed and what files they do use. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Michael, Yes, to develop games and apps for iOS devices you need a Mac with XCode and the iOS SDK. That's why its so hard to develop for iOS because its closed to non-Apple users and developers. As far as the PS 3 its actually built using a modified Linux distribution. Thit uses a Linux kernel, but the user interface is customized and the graphics, audio, and input libraries are proprietary to the unit. It doesn't use DirectX, but Sony's own multimedia API. As far as the XBox it uses a version of DirectX which is similar to the version that ships with Vista and Win 7. On 3/14/12, Michael Gauler michael.gau...@gmx.de wrote: Hi Dark, I am not familiar with MAC OS or IOS. But what I last heard was that you need to run MAC OS to compile IOS apps. I am not sure if that's still the case, but that was what I last heard. And the question about operating system access is not only about blind users. Somewhere I once read that you could install and run a linux distribution on the Play Station 3, but this feature was removed and without serious hacking, you can't do it right now. Yes, you are probably right that the PS3 doesn't have DirectX. But since I am not a developer of console games, I do not know if the PS3 has their own directX or at least something like it. So, we don't know what you would officially require to develop console games appart from licenses of course. And what about the xbox 360? It is a device developed by Microsoft, but because I don't have it, I can't know how games are developed and what files they do use. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Dark, Smile. Well, that's true enough. We do come at this entire issue from different perspectives,and makes sense when we look at the reasons why or how we use our computers. You tend to look at this situation strictly as a consumer, an end user, who only cares about playing his movies, writing your thesis, playing music, and some audio games. Which is perfectly valid since XP fulfills all of those needs for you, and as you pointed out Windows 7 won't bring anything really new to the table. So there isn't a pressing need to upgrade at this point. Believe it or not I do understand where you are coming from because even though I have Windows 7 for business purposes my personal OS of choice is Linux. The main reason is because I have Firefox for browsing the web, Thunderbird for handling e-mail, Pigeon for chatting on AIM and MSN, Totem for playing DVD movies, Rythmbox for playing my mp3s, Libre Office for word/Excel documents, etc. In other words other than a lack of audio games Linux provides all the necessities I need, and costs less for me to own and use. As a result if I were to compare Linux to Windows it offers me more benefits in the long run as an end user and software consumer. However, how I look at this issue of Windows 7 vs XP is from a software developer and business point of view. If I am going to remain in the technical support and software development field I absolutely must own and use the latest OS so I can serve my clients. As a result I tend to remain fairly up to date with software releases, do market research on what's coming in the future, and prepare for it in advance. Which means I'm always looking at technology from the long view rather than the short view. To give you an example since I know Windows 8 is supposed to be released later this year it only makes sense as a developer to find out what has changed, what I can do to make my software Windows 8 ready, so if someone runs out and buys it the day after release I know that my products are ready to run on the new OS. Unfortunately, as a developer sometimes preparing for a new OS or new technology breaks compatibility with older operating systems in existence. If I write a piece of software in VB 2010 using .NET 4.0 it will run on XP, Vista, Windows 7, and run on Windows 8 which comes with .NET 5.0. However, it won't work with Windows 98, Millennium, or 2000. As a developer it would require a major downgrade to .NET 1.1 in order to target those platforms which is one reason why software developers can't continue to support older software forever. Plus how much of a market is there for Windows 98/2000 software anyway? So in short while you are looking at this in terms of what can you do on Windows 7 you can't do on XP I'm looking at how many people are likely to buy new computers, upgrade to the latest technology, and tend to think strictly in terms of a developer or tech support specialist. That's why I tend to stay on top of technology.At least as far as Windows goes. With Linux I'm more like you preferring to stick with a long term support release simply because I don't want to grab the latest version every six months and don't mind using a version for two or three years unless there is something new such as KDE 4.8 which now has screen reader support and is going to be available for Ubuntu 12. Cheers! On 3/14/2012 7:06 AM, dark wrote: Hi tom. That makes sense, and if the choice was vista vs 7 i'd probably agree, however for me it's the compatibility issue that is the thing. For instance, While I've tried both windows live mail, microsoft outlook and thunderbird, nothing I thought was as good as outlook express. yes, they all came with more features, but seemed to take more navigation to access, for instance if I want a message to a contact in outlook express I just hit tab once from my inbox and bam, there is my contacts list as a dropdown. No mucking about with the address book or anything else. Does it do conferencing? multi user messages, threaded messages or the fancy stuff? no it doesn't, however when I write mail I don't particularly want any of that, I just want something that lets me read, reply, and write mails quickly and easily, and outlook express does that. Microsoft however have done their usual and in making the interface fancier for people with working eyeballs and adding billions of other functions, have overcomplicated the task of just writing, receiving and replying to E-mails. Of course, I'm fairly certain I could get used to using windows messenger or thunderbird, --- -but why should I? the new bennifits aren't things I'd use, and it'd just make what I do currently with outlook express more complex. The same goes for many other changes. It doesn't matter to me if windows 7 comes with the hooja flip new process speed 3000 upgrade of doom that makes it run 500 times faster and more securely if I
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
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. At 02:55 p.m. 14/03/2012 +0100, you wrote: What I never got was the reason why screen readers had to use all the stuff like video intercept and got so little result in using it. If I can clone my graphics card virtually and the screen reader is controlling the clone, then why does a screen reader need external OCR to handle letters? Moreover, if I have access to the entire screen and all graphic information, shouldn't i (the program) be capable of reading nearly anything except for moving and continously morphing pictures out of the box, so that MS or others thechnically wouldn't need to create a second voiceOver for Windows? --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
I think there will always be a space for a desk computer, or at least a computer on a desk, or a portable laptop type of system with full keyboard of some description. Maybe the desktop will be on the wall and most of our stuff will be touch or voice like startrek but even in startrek they had desktop terminals of some description. So the concept of the desktop won't go away. It may look different. What gets me is why we didn't move to touch earlier. I mean shape drawing will be really good especially if we have feadback. Ofcause all blind will have to buy apple or android to be real successfull with the new market. Ms changes to much to be relyable. Not that I will move any time soon having spent to much cash on games, and other junk, but if i started again, I'd get a chunky expensive braille device and maybe skip to apple solely. Maybe emulate windows on a vm but sertainly I wouldn't have windows as a prime os. I can't afford to move now though. At 02:49 p.m. 14/03/2012 +0100, you wrote: If the desktop computer is not the all in one package, why do I hear people saying that the IPhone or other mobile devices are the all in one package, when it is obviously not true? And, if consoles like the play station 3 are running their own operating system with internet access and such, then there would be the question why theese parts of their interfaces don't have their own build in accessibility features. And what I also don't get is, why developers, be they mainstream or audio game ones do limit themselves to one market segment. It is true that devices like the IPhone are growing in popularity even for blind users. And because of this we have some accessible games for the blind for such devices, like Papa Sangre. But What I don't get is, why there isn't a version of Papa Sangre for Mac OS X, which is like IOS and shares several components with it. Or there could be a version for Windows or Linux. And from a capitalistic point of view, it wouldn't be a bad idea to target several platforms together to gain maximum profit. That's why I never got why several PS2 and PS1 games like all God of War, Darkstalkers or Naruto games were never released for the PC. In the times the first titles of each series were released, there was no IPhone and computers (namely desktop computers) were still more like the all in one device and had a bigger market. It also doesn't explain, why severa l console games do have expansions or extra content available via some download service, while several old and new PC games don't have such features. And then there is the case of games like Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light where we have a massive content difference between platforms... --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Michael, Its really quite simple. Attempting to support more than one platform or technology requires lots of time, money, and isn't easy to do. Even though languages and technologies such as Java and Python have been developed to help aid in cross-platform development there is no one size fits all solution because there are just too many differences to make cross-platform development practical. For example, for quite a while now I've been looking into targeting Mac and Linux as well as Windows. Unfortunately, there are no common APIs exactly like DirectX. There is SDL, SFML, OpenAL, etc which are certainly cross-platform and could theoretically be used instead of DirectX. However, the downside is that most cross-platform solutions lack features found in a commercial API like DirectX and the game will suffer because of it. Here is a case in point. Let's assume I decided to write USA Raceway in C++, use SDL, andmake it cross-platform. Thanks to SDL and OpenAL I could port the game to Mac, Linux, and Windows, but there are some features you wouldn't get in the process. One disadvantage would be support for some gaming devices. SDL 1.2.13 does not support special devices like force feedback racing wheels. As a result a feature I could have with a game using DirectX wouldn't be possible using a cross-platform API like SDL. Another reason some games aren't ported to more than one platform is simply cost. In order to write games for gaming consoles like the Play Station, Wii, XBox, etc a company has to pay royalty fees for the use of the console as well as pay for proprietary development kits. This obviously gets expensive and not everyone, including mainstream game companies, can afford to do this for each and every game they develop. Finally, there is the issue of proprietary technologies that are simply incompatible with everything else. Apple is bad about this, because most of the software for Mac OS and iOS is written in a proprietary language called Object C. So if you write a game for an iOS device in Object C you can't just take the source and recompile it for Android. No, a developer has to completely rewrite the app from scratch which just isn't worth it. As to why the XBox or Play Station doesn't have a screen reader built in I think you already know the answer to that question. Its not financially in the companies interests to do it. Same could be said for microwaves, DVD players, and probably a thousand other things we own and use on a daily basis. We are too small a market to interest companies in improving accessibility of their products, and companies aren't in the habit of doing things like that for cherity. Cheers! On 3/14/2012 9:49 AM, Michael Gauler wrote: If the desktop computer is not the all in one package, why do I hear people saying that the IPhone or other mobile devices are the all in one package, when it is obviously not true? And, if consoles like the play station 3 are running their own operating system with internet access and such, then there would be the question why theese parts of their interfaces don't have their own build in accessibility features. And what I also don't get is, why developers, be they mainstream or audio game ones do limit themselves to one market segment. It is true that devices like the IPhone are growing in popularity even for blind users. And because of this we have some accessible games for the blind for such devices, like Papa Sangre. But What I don't get is, why there isn't a version of Papa Sangre for Mac OS X, which is like IOS and shares several components with it. Or there could be a version for Windows or Linux. And from a capitalistic point of view, it wouldn't be a bad idea to target several platforms together to gain maximum profit. That's why I never got why several PS2 and PS1 games like all God of War, Darkstalkers or Naruto games were never released for the PC. In the times the first titles of each series were released, there was no IPhone and computers (namely desktop computers) were still more like the all in one device and had a bigger market. It also doesn't explain, why severa l console games do have expansions or extra content available via some download service, while several old and new PC games don't have such features. And then there is the case of games like Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light where we have a massive content difference between platforms... --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Ok, let's think about this the other way around: Then if it is not in the companies interest to make DVD players or other devices accessible due to financial reasons, why does Windows have Narrator and Mac got VoiceOver included into the operating systems? If it is (theoretically) not a good idea because you won't make money with it? And while we are talking about market size. There are somewhere over six billion people on earth. How many of them are blind or or have other impairments? I only hear that our community is small but what is the actual size and do such statements about a small market include the world outside of the USA? I am not sure here, but most audio game developers are situated in the USA, correct? But no one seems to be asking if there are people outside of that region of the world, at least that's the way I see it. I am from Germany and regardless of how many developers my country has, even here are some people who have bought some audio games or have played the free ones. I have the unregistered version of BGT to play several free games created with it. I was there from the time of TopSpeed 1.1A up to the latest version of it. I also was there when the Alchemy version of Montezuma's revenge was first released. The point is, that we have an unknown number of people scattered around the world. And about speech technology and accessibility: If making devices accessible is not profitable, why does every major company developing TTS voices state that their products are used for embedded devices, automotive applications, phone call centers or for automatic teller machines? I went back to the town where I was born a few weeks ago. I found out that announcements of bus stops for public transport was changed to a German TTS voice instead of using the voices of several radio moderators and voice actors. Said TTS voice can be found in the program called Voice Reader. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Tom. this makes perfect sense, and indeed is also the reason why I have never investigated mac or lynux in further detail, simply because, while I know there are probably technical advantages to either os, those advantages don't matter a bit to me if they won't help me do what I do, part of which obviously includes a great many games. it's like the betamax vhs debate. Betamax was actually a more efficient tape system, less worn out, and technically clearer, however sinse fewer video companies secured betamax contracts, the system went down rapidly, however technically good it was. This is indeed another problem of competative capitalism, that the most prophitable and universal solution is the one that wins, not necessarily the best, but until there is another regulating standard on which to judge these things there's not a lot we can do. Less politically though, another point I've noticed is that many people who work routinely with computers have an intrinsic liking for the subject in themselves. For instance, a close friend of mine is a professional programm designer. When discussing his job, he stated that he gained satisfaction through the process of being given a task to write a program to fulfill and then going off and creatively writing one, irrispective of what that task was. For instance, he recently had to write a program to log and regulate all the pay slips and online reciets issued by a company, and track these to the employees taxes. To me, i can imagine nothing quite so dull, but for my friend, the fact that he! got to design the program to work with this information, calculate the numbers involve and display it securely and relevantly was the important thing, ie, it was the process he enjoyed. The same goes with game design. if (as I hope), in september of this year I write that text rpg I've always wanted to, for me the fun process will be the actual writing and designing and the fact that I'm creating a world and story for people to interact with. The programming will just bhe the process of making that thing happen, and as such I'll look around for a programming method that is easiest for me to use in doing that, rather than worry about a hole lot of programming concerns, such as for instance cross platform compatibility. yes, I want people to be able to play it, but sinse the process of writing the world and story is to me more interesting, I'd rather spend my time on creating something good in windows, than learning a lot of what is to me comparatively less interesting stuff to create something to run on mac or lynux. Of course, if the option I choose is something like Python (which seems likely given how easy python code looks to understand), it might come with cross compatibility anyway, but if not, I'm not going to worry about it. Selfish? just slightly, though I could also make a reasonable arguement that I'm simply focusing on the things I know! I can do, namely write convincing and interesting pros and come up with some balanced game mechanics, rather than the things I probably cannot such as memory management, worry about libraries, garbage checking and all the other weerd alchemical stuff that programmers need to do. in fact if I could just write in near to plane english I'd gladly do that, even if someone had to download something in order to play it. indeed I might just skip the programming altogether and carry on writing gamebooks with darkgrue, though inf airness there are matters of random description and combat rules that would need a little dice work behind the scenes which darkgrue couldn't handle, and the system I had in mind for a text rpg was rather more complex than just a basic gamebook. Beware the Grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
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. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi michael. firstly some stats and corrections. for your information while Usa games, gma, bsc, draconis, blind adrenalin and 7-128 are located in the usa, blastbay is based in sweedan, as was the old terraformers project, Vip gameszone is based in israil, audiogames.net is run from the netherlands, pontes games is run from romania, X site is run online but damien himself is in the Uk, Zero site is based in Italy, the old light tech interactive was a collaboration betwene one hungarian, one Iranian and one I believe czech developer, Nielsbauer who make smugglers are based in Germany, the recent Bari bari baseball and football games are bmade by a company in Japan, as is the developer of laser breakout, world of war, bockerano debuken etc. So while it is true there are many game developers in the Us, it's not true that most are based there, indeed neither are most of the audio games community (I'm english myself)l. As to percentages of population, at last count 2.6 percent of the total world population had low vision, and 0.6 percent are blind. However, of that 0.6 percent, only perhaps a fifth, so 0.13 percent will be under the age of 50, with most being 75 or older. this isn't to say older eople don't use electronics, but certainly most don't, in fact at a rough guess, I'd say that even in a modern country perhaps only 0.01 percent of the population will use computers or electronic devices, and of those not all will be gamers. When your dealing with big corporations who wreckon selling to at least ten percent of the total population if not more, then 0.01 percent doesn't cut the mustard unfortunately. Voices on bank machines, busses etc are also there to serve the percentage of the blind population who don't! use electronics, In fact would I'd say bennifit nearly all of that 0.06 percent, plus of course sighted members of the population who don't pay attention. As to why pcs and not games consoles etc, the answer is simple. Most blind people of working age or close to it (which actually means very few as I've said above), in modern countries are bought pcs by governmental institutions or charatieis for work. This is how companies like Freedom scientific, Dolphin and the people who make other screen readers make their money, by selling to institutions, also why the price of access tech is high, sinse while individuals can't usually afford it, institutions might be able to, and thus compensate for the comparatively few sales they'll get. Unfortunately, these are stats that can't be argued with, and being as most things in the world currently, especially to do with technology, are dictated by the almighty prophet margin there's not a lot that can be done. indeed, blind gamers are in a far worse position than other disabled groups, simply because most blind people are not of an age to play computer games, where as say motion impared gamers are of all ages. unfortunately, these are the facts and the numbers, and we're not in a world currenty where small numbers make a difference. Beware the Grue! dArk. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi tom. that all sounds pretty dire, I especially ahte the sound of the columnized views, but we'll see. Once again though this is the trend of having information all on screen rather than accessible through separate areas. i hope myself there will be the opportunity to put it into lists or some other change to stop it looking as stupid, and whoever thought of ribbons needs hanging on the end of one and punching for several days Imho. yes, I am biased I freely admit, but ribbons just annoy me, sinse they are so damn illogical. hopefully though sinse windows 7's lack of customizability in the interface was a major turn off microsoft will actually listen on this one and offer some alternatives, but we'll have to see. Otherwise I might be heading off to find bill gates with a very big hammer, though I suspect I'll have to wait in the kew, sinse I imagine lots of people are looking for bill gates with very big hammers :d. hay bill, like windows? maybe your head needs a new context window opening! let me pin this to your task bar! :d. Beware the Grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 11:58 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly 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. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Dark, As far as Windows Explorer goes I haven't experienced the issue you described. Its true that Windows Explorer is different, has buttons all over the place, etc but that's not effected me using it in the way you described. I'm wondering if this is a screen reader issue as I'm using NVDA without issue with Windows Explorer, or that you simply don't have Windows Explorer setup correctly. For example, if I press enter on Documents Explorer opens up and NVDA lands on the first item in the list. Now, I have my copy of Windows Explorer to display all of my items in a list which is more accessible than the default, and that might be an issue for you as well. By default I think Explorer is set to details which is less user friendly for me and I have to arrow around to find things where setting the view settings to display items in a list does just that so all I have to do is up or down arrow through the list of files and folders. Basically, what I am saying is many of the issues you mention have workarounds. Windows 7 is very accessible. I've not had any serious access issues with it and NVDA. I can't speak for Supernova, of course, but I think if you have an issue with something like Windows Explorer changing the view settings will go a long ways to correcting the issue. Its just a matter of knowing how to reconfigure things in Win 7 to get the most accessibility out of the OS. Its a clear case of knowing is half the battle. Same could be said for Ubuntu 12. In its default state its not very accessible, but I'm an old Linux user so know how to go in and set everything up so that I have a stable and accessible environment. Just a few days ago I put Ubuntu 12 beta 1 on on a virtual machine. When I installed it I could barely use it because Unity is broken access wise. No problem for me though. I switched over to a console, braught up speakup, and downloaded Gnome 3.2 from the Ubuntu software repository, edited a couple of files for lightdm, rebooted the virtual machine, logged in, and came up with the Orca screen reader and an accessible desktop environment. So what's the moral of the story? Simply this. Don't assume something isn't accessible because you've had bad experiences with it. If you educate yourself on accessibility, learn what features an operating system has for accessibility, talk to others how to resolve accessibility issues, chances are you can get the most out of your operating system. Regardless if we are talking about Windows 7 or the latest Linux release knowing how to resolve access issues will make it possible to stay up to date and be on an equal level with our sighted peers. I think what happens in all too many cases the average blind user tries a piece of software, has trouble with it, and give up on it completely. They assume because they ran into access issues early on that this or that isn't accessible even though there may be ways to workaround the issue or by changing a few default settings a piece of inaccessible software is made accessible. For instance, I remember I was on a tech list where a blind user said Avast was totally inaccessible when he tried it. I asked him if he had gone into preferences and changed a couple of settings. He answered no. The sad part of this particular case is that he didn't know what settings were needed to be changed to make Avast accessible, didn't ask how to make Avast accessible, assumed it wasn't accessible, and uninstalled it without any further investigation what-so-ever. Then, told everyone else it wasn't accessible based on his experience which was extremely limited at best. I'll just sum up by saying that people need to take more time and have a little more patients with software. They shouldn't just assume something isn't accessible or can't be made accessible because they spent a few minutes with it and gave up. Obviously the software is new to them, they haven't learned how to get the most out of the software, and should take some time getting to know it before just writing it off. Cheers! On 3/12/2012 4:08 AM, dark wrote: Hi tom. that is indeed a nice list of pros and cons, and it is true there are a couple of features that would be useful, I especially like the sound of full 5.1 sinse at the moment I'm working with virtual 3D sound, which is fine, but probably not what it could be. Just as another Ui question though, what about the desktop and windows expllorer in windows 7? when I tried the system, this looked entirely broken and hugely inconvenient for a screen reader, with random stuff all over the place, no clear listed folder structure, and lots of weerd buttons. For instance pressing enter on a folder didn't seem to display it's contents as in xp, it seemed to open it in yet another pain that I had to tab too, and then give under each item some strange buttons to do various things. Is windows explorer really this bad in terms of
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi, Same here. I set Windows Explorer to list view, turn on file extentions, and turn off the status bar and everything seems to work fine after that. On 3/12/2012 4:26 AM, Jacob Kruger wrote: Windows explorer works fine for me, with either jaws or NVDA, and only thing is I don't bother with any form of tree structure, since when I hit windows key + E it lands in a list of drives, arrow around, hit enter on the one I want to go into, same with folders, backspace key to move up one level, etc., and only real settings change is that one of the first things I do on any newly installed version of windows, including XP, is that set folder view to list view, activate status bar off view menu, go to tools menu, arrow up to folder options, ctrl tab to view tab, and on advanced settings make sure file extensions are shown, etc. then hit space bar on apply settings for all folders, and this works well enough for me then. I am also running the windows7 basic theme in display themes, but not sure how relevant that is to windows explorer, but it might be. Stay well Jacob Kruger Blind Biker Skype: BlindZA '...fate had broken his body, but not his spirit...' --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Something is nice with the details view of W7 explorer: you can use left and right arrow to see the size, type, modification date, etc. of a file. Of course turning extensions always on is the first thing to do with a new windows, even since 98. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Tom. It is true that I have my own folders in xp set as lists, and the windows 7 machine I tried wasn't mine, I just wasn't sure whether all those buttons and random controls were part of the interface or could be disabled. Beware the grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 8:37 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Hi Dark, As far as Windows Explorer goes I haven't experienced the issue you described. Its true that Windows Explorer is different, has buttons all over the place, etc but that's not effected me using it in the way you described. I'm wondering if this is a screen reader issue as I'm using NVDA without issue with Windows Explorer, or that you simply don't have Windows Explorer setup correctly. For example, if I press enter on Documents Explorer opens up and NVDA lands on the first item in the list. Now, I have my copy of Windows Explorer to display all of my items in a list which is more accessible than the default, and that might be an issue for you as well. By default I think Explorer is set to details which is less user friendly for me and I have to arrow around to find things where setting the view settings to display items in a list does just that so all I have to do is up or down arrow through the list of files and folders. Basically, what I am saying is many of the issues you mention have workarounds. Windows 7 is very accessible. I've not had any serious access issues with it and NVDA. I can't speak for Supernova, of course, but I think if you have an issue with something like Windows Explorer changing the view settings will go a long ways to correcting the issue. Its just a matter of knowing how to reconfigure things in Win 7 to get the most accessibility out of the OS. Its a clear case of knowing is half the battle. Same could be said for Ubuntu 12. In its default state its not very accessible, but I'm an old Linux user so know how to go in and set everything up so that I have a stable and accessible environment. Just a few days ago I put Ubuntu 12 beta 1 on on a virtual machine. When I installed it I could barely use it because Unity is broken access wise. No problem for me though. I switched over to a console, braught up speakup, and downloaded Gnome 3.2 from the Ubuntu software repository, edited a couple of files for lightdm, rebooted the virtual machine, logged in, and came up with the Orca screen reader and an accessible desktop environment. So what's the moral of the story? Simply this. Don't assume something isn't accessible because you've had bad experiences with it. If you educate yourself on accessibility, learn what features an operating system has for accessibility, talk to others how to resolve accessibility issues, chances are you can get the most out of your operating system. Regardless if we are talking about Windows 7 or the latest Linux release knowing how to resolve access issues will make it possible to stay up to date and be on an equal level with our sighted peers. I think what happens in all too many cases the average blind user tries a piece of software, has trouble with it, and give up on it completely. They assume because they ran into access issues early on that this or that isn't accessible even though there may be ways to workaround the issue or by changing a few default settings a piece of inaccessible software is made accessible. For instance, I remember I was on a tech list where a blind user said Avast was totally inaccessible when he tried it. I asked him if he had gone into preferences and changed a couple of settings. He answered no. The sad part of this particular case is that he didn't know what settings were needed to be changed to make Avast accessible, didn't ask how to make Avast accessible, assumed it wasn't accessible, and uninstalled it without any further investigation what-so-ever. Then, told everyone else it wasn't accessible based on his experience which was extremely limited at best. I'll just sum up by saying that people need to take more time and have a little more patients with software. They shouldn't just assume something isn't accessible or can't be made accessible because they spent a few minutes with it and gave up. Obviously the software is new to them, they haven't learned how to get the most out of the software, and should take some time getting to know it before just writing it off. Cheers! On 3/12/2012 4:08 AM, dark wrote: Hi tom. that is indeed a nice list of pros and cons, and it is true there are a couple of features that would be useful, I especially like the sound of full 5.1 sinse at the moment I'm working with virtual 3D sound, which is fine, but probably not what it could be. Just as another Ui question though, what about the desktop and windows expllorer in windows 7? when I tried the system
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Dark, Yes, unfortunately all the buttons etc are a part of the new interface. I've used Vista and now Windows 7 so have had time to get use to them, but I didn't care too much for the new version of Explorer either when I first encountered it under Vista. However, I have at least managed to customize Explorer enough that I can ignore all the extra junk that comes along with it. That said, you should have seen the Explorer that came with some of the betas of Windows 8. Now, that was a nightmare. In addition to the buttons and other crap the menubar had been replaced with the ribbons that really was a major turn off. Now, I hear the ribbons are suppose to be removed before final release and let's hope so. Although, Windows 8 will be a dramatic departcher from XP and even Windows 7 as far as the U.I. goes. Part of the reason for that is that Apple's iOS and Google's Android OS is very trendy. Everything is moving to touch screens, and Microsoft like everyone else is attempting to come up with a touch screen U.I. similar to Apple's touchscreen U.I. for iOS. Windows 8 has a radically new user interface with new touch screen technology which is similar to iOS, and people who love XP will likely hate Win 8 because Microsoft is pandering to the touchscreen users with their new U.I. Same thing is happening in the Linux world too. Ubuntu 12 uses Unity because Cononical is attempting to market Ubuntu Linux for cell phones, tablet PCs, netbooks, etc all with the new touch screen interface we are seeing with iOS, and in order to stay competative Linux distros like Ubuntu have to move away from traditional graphical user interfaces and adopt trendier interfaces like Unity. Which often leaves access technology in the position of playing catch up. Cheers! On 3/13/2012 6:27 AM, dark wrote: Hi Tom. It is true that I have my own folders in xp set as lists, and the windows 7 machine I tried wasn't mine, I just wasn't sure whether all those buttons and random controls were part of the interface or could be disabled. Beware the grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Yep, once again why can't microsoft just continue xp? :D. Goodness knows what will happen with access tech and windows 8, it's a shame after very stable access to xp that things are moving in this direction, but once again because vi users are a minority we get the short end of the stick. I have at least heard that ribbons are so disliked they're coming out of windows 8, and I've also heard windows 8 has 16 bit compatibility, so there are at least a couple of pluses there albeit small ones. Beware the grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 10:54 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Hi Dark, Yes, unfortunately all the buttons etc are a part of the new interface. I've used Vista and now Windows 7 so have had time to get use to them, but I didn't care too much for the new version of Explorer either when I first encountered it under Vista. However, I have at least managed to customize Explorer enough that I can ignore all the extra junk that comes along with it. That said, you should have seen the Explorer that came with some of the betas of Windows 8. Now, that was a nightmare. In addition to the buttons and other crap the menubar had been replaced with the ribbons that really was a major turn off. Now, I hear the ribbons are suppose to be removed before final release and let's hope so. Although, Windows 8 will be a dramatic departcher from XP and even Windows 7 as far as the U.I. goes. Part of the reason for that is that Apple's iOS and Google's Android OS is very trendy. Everything is moving to touch screens, and Microsoft like everyone else is attempting to come up with a touch screen U.I. similar to Apple's touchscreen U.I. for iOS. Windows 8 has a radically new user interface with new touch screen technology which is similar to iOS, and people who love XP will likely hate Win 8 because Microsoft is pandering to the touchscreen users with their new U.I. Same thing is happening in the Linux world too. Ubuntu 12 uses Unity because Cononical is attempting to market Ubuntu Linux for cell phones, tablet PCs, netbooks, etc all with the new touch screen interface we are seeing with iOS, and in order to stay competative Linux distros like Ubuntu have to move away from traditional graphical user interfaces and adopt trendier interfaces like Unity. Which often leaves access technology in the position of playing catch up. Cheers! On 3/13/2012 6:27 AM, dark wrote: Hi Tom. It is true that I have my own folders in xp set as lists, and the windows 7 machine I tried wasn't mine, I just wasn't sure whether all those buttons and random controls were part of the interface or could be disabled. Beware the grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Hi Dark, Well, I think you know the answer to that already. Microsoft is out to make money, and in order to stay competitive they have to follow whatever trends are popular in the technology market. Since tablets, smart phones, PDAs, and other handheld devices have become the rave over the last few years simply updating XP won't do. They need to redesign the entire user interface from the ground up for those handheld devices. Since the same technology is being ported to the PC market as well Microsoft is simply building the same interface into the desktop OS as for mobile devices, because its more intuitive for a sighted user. VI users are always going to take a backseat to sighted users simply because intuitive visual user interfaces is what drives the market. For example, lets assume you have Windows 8 running on a tablet PC. Now, if you are using a touchscreen you can point at a icon on your taskbar, tap it twice with your finger, and open the app up just like that. It doesn't require navigating menus etc as everything you pin to the taskbar is right there just a finger point away. Its intuitive, easy, and I suppose better for sighted users as they don't even need a mouse to point and click on icons to open them up. Its the next generation user interface, and its being driven by people's exposure to Droid and iPhones. This is just speculation on my part but the way tablet PCs and smart phones are going I look for the standard desktop or laptop to be ancient history by the next decade. Businesses may still continue to use desktop PCs, but the average home user will probably be carrying around tablets running the latest version of Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, Linux, etc just because of the convenience of smaller more handy computers. My dad who just retired last year doesn't go anywhere without his Droid phone. Its not just a phone for him because I've seen him watch movies on Youtube, play games, take notes on it, browse the web, read e-mail, etc all from his phone. He rarely boots his desktop computer, because he can do most things from his phone. This is happening all over the world right now, and that's a very good reason why XP and other traditional desktop operating systems like it are running on borrowed time. Eventually, the handheld market will push the PC industry into adopting newer interfaces like Windows 8 and touchscreens to remain competitive. Weather we like it or not blind computer users will have to adapt to it sooner or later, because we have little say or choice in the matter. That's why I use Windows 7 and will likely upgrade to Windows 8 when it comes out. Eventually, I'll have to change and my philosophy is, better get use to it sooner than later. Cheers! On 3/13/2012 7:41 AM, dark wrote: Yep, once again why can't microsoft just continue xp? :D. Goodness knows what will happen with access tech and windows 8, it's a shame after very stable access to xp that things are moving in this direction, but once again because vi users are a minority we get the short end of the stick. I have at least heard that ribbons are so disliked they're coming out of windows 8, and I've also heard windows 8 has 16 bit compatibility, so there are at least a couple of pluses there albeit small ones. Beware the grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
As far as touch goes your right its showing more and more. Even vista has some touch screen stuff. The only hold back is monitors, not many have it but that will be changing too. At 08:31 AM 3/13/2012, you wrote: Hi Dark, Well, I think you know the answer to that already. Microsoft is out to make money, and in order to stay competitive they have to follow whatever trends are popular in the technology market. Since tablets, smart phones, PDAs, and other handheld devices have become the rave over the last few years simply updating XP won't do. They need to redesign the entire user interface from the ground up for those handheld devices. Since the same technology is being ported to the PC market as well Microsoft is simply building the same interface into the desktop OS as for mobile devices, because its more intuitive for a sighted user. VI users are always going to take a backseat to sighted users simply because intuitive visual user interfaces is what drives the market. For example, lets assume you have Windows 8 running on a tablet PC. Now, if you are using a touchscreen you can point at a icon on your taskbar, tap it twice with your finger, and open the app up just like that. It doesn't require navigating menus etc as everything you pin to the taskbar is right there just a finger point away. Its intuitive, easy, and I suppose better for sighted users as they don't even need a mouse to point and click on icons to open them up. Its the next generation user interface, and its being driven by people's exposure to Droid and iPhones. This is just speculation on my part but the way tablet PCs and smart phones are going I look for the standard desktop or laptop to be ancient history by the next decade. Businesses may still continue to use desktop PCs, but the average home user will probably be carrying around tablets running the latest version of Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, Linux, etc just because of the convenience of smaller more handy computers. My dad who just retired last year doesn't go anywhere without his Droid phone. Its not just a phone for him because I've seen him watch movies on Youtube, play games, take notes on it, browse the web, read e-mail, etc all from his phone. He rarely boots his desktop computer, because he can do most things from his phone. This is happening all over the world right now, and that's a very good reason why XP and other traditional desktop operating systems like it are running on borrowed time. Eventually, the handheld market will push the PC industry into adopting newer interfaces like Windows 8 and touchscreens to remain competitive. Weather we like it or not blind computer users will have to adapt to it sooner or later, because we have little say or choice in the matter. That's why I use Windows 7 and will likely upgrade to Windows 8 when it comes out. Eventually, I'll have to change and my philosophy is, better get use to it sooner than later. Cheers! On 3/13/2012 7:41 AM, dark wrote: Yep, once again why can't microsoft just continue xp? :D. Goodness knows what will happen with access tech and windows 8, it's a shame after very stable access to xp that things are moving in this direction, but once again because vi users are a minority we get the short end of the stick. I have at least heard that ribbons are so disliked they're coming out of windows 8, and I've also heard windows 8 has 16 bit compatibility, so there are at least a couple of pluses there albeit small ones. Beware the grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
I agree tom, prophiteering capitalist scumbags run things unfortunately. Myself however I disagree with your philosophy of get it and get used to it as I've said before, windows 7 would stop! me doing more stuff, so why should I use it? I use a parrot voice mate, which is one of the finest hand held personal organizers I've ever found, and great for phone numbers, voice notes etc. Should I stop using it becuase the firm that make them have gone bust? Heck no! of course, if I replace my laptop with an Iphone with voiceover, I'll probably no longer need the parrot voicemate, sinse the Iphone will do most of those functions, but sinse I currently just use a phone that is just a phone, and does nothing fancy, and would cost a lot of money to get a speech synth for it, I'll stick with the voicemate because it works for what I want. I don't really see why i should get used to doing something just because it is the latest thing and I'll have to change eventually, indeed I'll probably try and keep my desktop going as long as possible and change only if it looks like a better option is available with a newer system. Btw, I agree about hand helds taking over, however I don't think the desktop pc will be quite gone, simply because of the amount of people who (like myself), use it as a general multimedia device. i use my pc for watching films, laying games etc, on a decent sized screen connected to a set of speakers, and that is one use that the hand held would never fill simply because the idea of connecting a hand held to a home cinema system or full sized screen is a bit ridiculous. I think laptops will be a thing of the past, but the desktop I still see as staying around exactly for this reason, even if the ui does irritatingly change. Beware the Grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 12:31 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Hi Dark, Well, I think you know the answer to that already. Microsoft is out to make money, and in order to stay competitive they have to follow whatever trends are popular in the technology market. Since tablets, smart phones, PDAs, and other handheld devices have become the rave over the last few years simply updating XP won't do. They need to redesign the entire user interface from the ground up for those handheld devices. Since the same technology is being ported to the PC market as well Microsoft is simply building the same interface into the desktop OS as for mobile devices, because its more intuitive for a sighted user. VI users are always going to take a backseat to sighted users simply because intuitive visual user interfaces is what drives the market. For example, lets assume you have Windows 8 running on a tablet PC. Now, if you are using a touchscreen you can point at a icon on your taskbar, tap it twice with your finger, and open the app up just like that. It doesn't require navigating menus etc as everything you pin to the taskbar is right there just a finger point away. Its intuitive, easy, and I suppose better for sighted users as they don't even need a mouse to point and click on icons to open them up. Its the next generation user interface, and its being driven by people's exposure to Droid and iPhones. This is just speculation on my part but the way tablet PCs and smart phones are going I look for the standard desktop or laptop to be ancient history by the next decade. Businesses may still continue to use desktop PCs, but the average home user will probably be carrying around tablets running the latest version of Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, Linux, etc just because of the convenience of smaller more handy computers. My dad who just retired last year doesn't go anywhere without his Droid phone. Its not just a phone for him because I've seen him watch movies on Youtube, play games, take notes on it, browse the web, read e-mail, etc all from his phone. He rarely boots his desktop computer, because he can do most things from his phone. This is happening all over the world right now, and that's a very good reason why XP and other traditional desktop operating systems like it are running on borrowed time. Eventually, the handheld market will push the PC industry into adopting newer interfaces like Windows 8 and touchscreens to remain competitive. Weather we like it or not blind computer users will have to adapt to it sooner or later, because we have little say or choice in the matter. That's why I use Windows 7 and will likely upgrade to Windows 8 when it comes out. Eventually, I'll have to change and my philosophy is, better get use to it sooner than later. Cheers! On 3/13/2012 7:41 AM, dark wrote: Yep, once again why can't microsoft just continue xp? :D. Goodness knows what will happen with access tech and windows 8, it's a shame after very stable access
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Not really relevant, but will just mention that with regard to phones, and large screens, etc., I think my nokia N82/N86 came with a TV out adapter...LOL! Stay well Jacob Kruger Blind Biker Skype: BlindZA '...fate had broken his body, but not his spirit...' - Original Message - From: dark d...@xgam.org To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 3:13 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly I agree tom, prophiteering capitalist scumbags run things unfortunately. Myself however I disagree with your philosophy of get it and get used to it as I've said before, windows 7 would stop! me doing more stuff, so why should I use it? I use a parrot voice mate, which is one of the finest hand held personal organizers I've ever found, and great for phone numbers, voice notes etc. Should I stop using it becuase the firm that make them have gone bust? Heck no! of course, if I replace my laptop with an Iphone with voiceover, I'll probably no longer need the parrot voicemate, sinse the Iphone will do most of those functions, but sinse I currently just use a phone that is just a phone, and does nothing fancy, and would cost a lot of money to get a speech synth for it, I'll stick with the voicemate because it works for what I want. I don't really see why i should get used to doing something just because it is the latest thing and I'll have to change eventually, indeed I'll probably try and keep my desktop going as long as possible and change only if it looks like a better option is available with a newer system. Btw, I agree about hand helds taking over, however I don't think the desktop pc will be quite gone, simply because of the amount of people who (like myself), use it as a general multimedia device. i use my pc for watching films, laying games etc, on a decent sized screen connected to a set of speakers, and that is one use that the hand held would never fill simply because the idea of connecting a hand held to a home cinema system or full sized screen is a bit ridiculous. I think laptops will be a thing of the past, but the desktop I still see as staying around exactly for this reason, even if the ui does irritatingly change. Beware the Grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 12:31 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Hi Dark, Well, I think you know the answer to that already. Microsoft is out to make money, and in order to stay competitive they have to follow whatever trends are popular in the technology market. Since tablets, smart phones, PDAs, and other handheld devices have become the rave over the last few years simply updating XP won't do. They need to redesign the entire user interface from the ground up for those handheld devices. Since the same technology is being ported to the PC market as well Microsoft is simply building the same interface into the desktop OS as for mobile devices, because its more intuitive for a sighted user. VI users are always going to take a backseat to sighted users simply because intuitive visual user interfaces is what drives the market. For example, lets assume you have Windows 8 running on a tablet PC. Now, if you are using a touchscreen you can point at a icon on your taskbar, tap it twice with your finger, and open the app up just like that. It doesn't require navigating menus etc as everything you pin to the taskbar is right there just a finger point away. Its intuitive, easy, and I suppose better for sighted users as they don't even need a mouse to point and click on icons to open them up. Its the next generation user interface, and its being driven by people's exposure to Droid and iPhones. This is just speculation on my part but the way tablet PCs and smart phones are going I look for the standard desktop or laptop to be ancient history by the next decade. Businesses may still continue to use desktop PCs, but the average home user will probably be carrying around tablets running the latest version of Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, Linux, etc just because of the convenience of smaller more handy computers. My dad who just retired last year doesn't go anywhere without his Droid phone. Its not just a phone for him because I've seen him watch movies on Youtube, play games, take notes on it, browse the web, read e-mail, etc all from his phone. He rarely boots his desktop computer, because he can do most things from his phone. This is happening all over the world right now, and that's a very good reason why XP and other traditional desktop operating systems like it are running on borrowed time. Eventually, the handheld market will push the PC industry into adopting newer interfaces like Windows 8 and touchscreens to remain competitive. Weather we like it or not blind computer users will have to adapt to it sooner or later
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
yep it does come with one. At 09:21 AM 3/13/2012, you wrote: Not really relevant, but will just mention that with regard to phones, and large screens, etc., I think my nokia N82/N86 came with a TV out adapter...LOL! Stay well Jacob Kruger Blind Biker Skype: BlindZA '...fate had broken his body, but not his spirit...' - Original Message - From: dark d...@xgam.org To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 3:13 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly I agree tom, prophiteering capitalist scumbags run things unfortunately. Myself however I disagree with your philosophy of get it and get used to it as I've said before, windows 7 would stop! me doing more stuff, so why should I use it? I use a parrot voice mate, which is one of the finest hand held personal organizers I've ever found, and great for phone numbers, voice notes etc. Should I stop using it becuase the firm that make them have gone bust? Heck no! of course, if I replace my laptop with an Iphone with voiceover, I'll probably no longer need the parrot voicemate, sinse the Iphone will do most of those functions, but sinse I currently just use a phone that is just a phone, and does nothing fancy, and would cost a lot of money to get a speech synth for it, I'll stick with the voicemate because it works for what I want. I don't really see why i should get used to doing something just because it is the latest thing and I'll have to change eventually, indeed I'll probably try and keep my desktop going as long as possible and change only if it looks like a better option is available with a newer system. Btw, I agree about hand helds taking over, however I don't think the desktop pc will be quite gone, simply because of the amount of people who (like myself), use it as a general multimedia device. i use my pc for watching films, laying games etc, on a decent sized screen connected to a set of speakers, and that is one use that the hand held would never fill simply because the idea of connecting a hand held to a home cinema system or full sized screen is a bit ridiculous. I think laptops will be a thing of the past, but the desktop I still see as staying around exactly for this reason, even if the ui does irritatingly change. Beware the Grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 12:31 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Hi Dark, Well, I think you know the answer to that already. Microsoft is out to make money, and in order to stay competitive they have to follow whatever trends are popular in the technology market. Since tablets, smart phones, PDAs, and other handheld devices have become the rave over the last few years simply updating XP won't do. They need to redesign the entire user interface from the ground up for those handheld devices. Since the same technology is being ported to the PC market as well Microsoft is simply building the same interface into the desktop OS as for mobile devices, because its more intuitive for a sighted user. VI users are always going to take a backseat to sighted users simply because intuitive visual user interfaces is what drives the market. For example, lets assume you have Windows 8 running on a tablet PC. Now, if you are using a touchscreen you can point at a icon on your taskbar, tap it twice with your finger, and open the app up just like that. It doesn't require navigating menus etc as everything you pin to the taskbar is right there just a finger point away. Its intuitive, easy, and I suppose better for sighted users as they don't even need a mouse to point and click on icons to open them up. Its the next generation user interface, and its being driven by people's exposure to Droid and iPhones. This is just speculation on my part but the way tablet PCs and smart phones are going I look for the standard desktop or laptop to be ancient history by the next decade. Businesses may still continue to use desktop PCs, but the average home user will probably be carrying around tablets running the latest version of Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, Linux, etc just because of the convenience of smaller more handy computers. My dad who just retired last year doesn't go anywhere without his Droid phone. Its not just a phone for him because I've seen him watch movies on Youtube, play games, take notes on it, browse the web, read e-mail, etc all from his phone. He rarely boots his desktop computer, because he can do most things from his phone. This is happening all over the world right now, and that's a very good reason why XP and other traditional desktop operating systems like it are running on borrowed time. Eventually, the handheld market will push the PC industry into adopting newer interfaces like Windows 8 and touchscreens to remain competitive. Weather we like
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
I agree. I know we're a minority but I still think we should be able to have a choice regarding this, a lot of us will be left in the cold if the big companies get their way. Or should I say when they get their way. Amanda -Original Message- From: dark Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 11:41 AM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Yep, once again why can't microsoft just continue xp? :D. Goodness knows what will happen with access tech and windows 8, it's a shame after very stable access to xp that things are moving in this direction, but once again because vi users are a minority we get the short end of the stick. I have at least heard that ribbons are so disliked they're coming out of windows 8, and I've also heard windows 8 has 16 bit compatibility, so there are at least a couple of pluses there albeit small ones. Beware the grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 10:54 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Hi Dark, Yes, unfortunately all the buttons etc are a part of the new interface. I've used Vista and now Windows 7 so have had time to get use to them, but I didn't care too much for the new version of Explorer either when I first encountered it under Vista. However, I have at least managed to customize Explorer enough that I can ignore all the extra junk that comes along with it. That said, you should have seen the Explorer that came with some of the betas of Windows 8. Now, that was a nightmare. In addition to the buttons and other crap the menubar had been replaced with the ribbons that really was a major turn off. Now, I hear the ribbons are suppose to be removed before final release and let's hope so. Although, Windows 8 will be a dramatic departcher from XP and even Windows 7 as far as the U.I. goes. Part of the reason for that is that Apple's iOS and Google's Android OS is very trendy. Everything is moving to touch screens, and Microsoft like everyone else is attempting to come up with a touch screen U.I. similar to Apple's touchscreen U.I. for iOS. Windows 8 has a radically new user interface with new touch screen technology which is similar to iOS, and people who love XP will likely hate Win 8 because Microsoft is pandering to the touchscreen users with their new U.I. Same thing is happening in the Linux world too. Ubuntu 12 uses Unity because Cononical is attempting to market Ubuntu Linux for cell phones, tablet PCs, netbooks, etc all with the new touch screen interface we are seeing with iOS, and in order to stay competative Linux distros like Ubuntu have to move away from traditional graphical user interfaces and adopt trendier interfaces like Unity. Which often leaves access technology in the position of playing catch up. Cheers! On 3/13/2012 6:27 AM, dark wrote: Hi Tom. It is true that I have my own folders in xp set as lists, and the windows 7 machine I tried wasn't mine, I just wasn't sure whether all those buttons and random controls were part of the interface or could be disabled. Beware the grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
As a programmer and developer, I understand completely why Microsoft (or any developer for that matter) would want to discontinue an older product. Maintenance is expensive and irritating. Keep in mind that if they simply try to continue XP (and every other product that some minority group prefers), they will lose money. If they go broke, there are no more products. How do you think MS pays for XP maintenance right now? They do it with sales of products that make money. XP doesn't make money anymore, and they couldn't make it pay for itself if they tried. I've had similar complaints come up on Alter Aeon - why don't I just make ltypes 0 and 1 optional, why don't I just make PPK optional, why don't I bring up separate servers that allow multiplaying, etc. If I tried to do even a fraction of these things, AA would never progress because I'd be spending all my time maintaining crap that doesn't actually make the game any better. All developers have to pick and choose their battles. Microsoft is no different. I know it may be irritating to have to change your ways or learn new things, but the fact of the matter is that we can't all be expecting windows 3.1 (or whatever your favorite version is) to work the same way for the next 20 years. Change happens. It may not seem like it, but usually, it actually is for the better. Dennis Towne Alter Aeon MUD http://www.alteraeon.com On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 4:09 PM, Amanda Burt amanda.bu...@btinternet.com wrote: I agree. I know we're a minority but I still think we should be able to have a choice regarding this, a lot of us will be left in the cold if the big companies get their way. Or should I say when they get their way. Amanda -Original Message- From: dark Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 11:41 AM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Yep, once again why can't microsoft just continue xp? :D. Goodness knows what will happen with access tech and windows 8, it's a shame after very stable access to xp that things are moving in this direction, but once again because vi users are a minority we get the short end of the stick. I have at least heard that ribbons are so disliked they're coming out of windows 8, and I've also heard windows 8 has 16 bit compatibility, so there are at least a couple of pluses there albeit small ones. Beware the grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 10:54 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Hi Dark, Yes, unfortunately all the buttons etc are a part of the new interface. I've used Vista and now Windows 7 so have had time to get use to them, but I didn't care too much for the new version of Explorer either when I first encountered it under Vista. However, I have at least managed to customize Explorer enough that I can ignore all the extra junk that comes along with it. That said, you should have seen the Explorer that came with some of the betas of Windows 8. Now, that was a nightmare. In addition to the buttons and other crap the menubar had been replaced with the ribbons that really was a major turn off. Now, I hear the ribbons are suppose to be removed before final release and let's hope so. Although, Windows 8 will be a dramatic departcher from XP and even Windows 7 as far as the U.I. goes. Part of the reason for that is that Apple's iOS and Google's Android OS is very trendy. Everything is moving to touch screens, and Microsoft like everyone else is attempting to come up with a touch screen U.I. similar to Apple's touchscreen U.I. for iOS. Windows 8 has a radically new user interface with new touch screen technology which is similar to iOS, and people who love XP will likely hate Win 8 because Microsoft is pandering to the touchscreen users with their new U.I. Same thing is happening in the Linux world too. Ubuntu 12 uses Unity because Cononical is attempting to market Ubuntu Linux for cell phones, tablet PCs, netbooks, etc all with the new touch screen interface we are seeing with iOS, and in order to stay competative Linux distros like Ubuntu have to move away from traditional graphical user interfaces and adopt trendier interfaces like Unity. Which often leaves access technology in the position of playing catch up. Cheers! On 3/13/2012 6:27 AM, dark wrote: Hi Tom. It is true that I have my own folders in xp set as lists, and the windows 7 machine I tried wasn't mine, I just wasn't sure whether all those buttons and random controls were part of the interface or could be disabled. Beware the grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
well a gwmicro win eyes csun review has win8 going to uia more meaning no drivers are required. Ofcause if ms had done this before we relied on sapi, mssa and a whole bunch of other libs for access it would be ok. It sounds like though ti will be better for everyone, however why they made us use all that junk if it was going to be put in a few years into 1 library thats the issue. At 11:41 a.m. 13/03/2012 +, you wrote: Yep, once again why can't microsoft just continue xp? :D. Goodness knows what will happen with access tech and windows 8, it's a shame after very stable access to xp that things are moving in this direction, but once again because vi users are a minority we get the short end of the stick. I have at least heard that ribbons are so disliked they're coming out of windows 8, and I've also heard windows 8 has 16 bit compatibility, so there are at least a couple of pluses there albeit small ones. Beware the grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 10:54 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly Hi Dark, Yes, unfortunately all the buttons etc are a part of the new interface. I've used Vista and now Windows 7 so have had time to get use to them, but I didn't care too much for the new version of Explorer either when I first encountered it under Vista. However, I have at least managed to customize Explorer enough that I can ignore all the extra junk that comes along with it. That said, you should have seen the Explorer that came with some of the betas of Windows 8. Now, that was a nightmare. In addition to the buttons and other crap the menubar had been replaced with the ribbons that really was a major turn off. Now, I hear the ribbons are suppose to be removed before final release and let's hope so. Although, Windows 8 will be a dramatic departcher from XP and even Windows 7 as far as the U.I. goes. Part of the reason for that is that Apple's iOS and Google's Android OS is very trendy. Everything is moving to touch screens, and Microsoft like everyone else is attempting to come up with a touch screen U.I. similar to Apple's touchscreen U.I. for iOS. Windows 8 has a radically new user interface with new touch screen technology which is similar to iOS, and people who love XP will likely hate Win 8 because Microsoft is pandering to the touchscreen users with their new U.I. Same thing is happening in the Linux world too. Ubuntu 12 uses Unity because Cononical is attempting to market Ubuntu Linux for cell phones, tablet PCs, netbooks, etc all with the new touch screen interface we are seeing with iOS, and in order to stay competative Linux distros like Ubuntu have to move away from traditional graphical user interfaces and adopt trendier interfaces like Unity. Which often leaves access technology in the position of playing catch up. Cheers! On 3/13/2012 6:27 AM, dark wrote: Hi Tom. It is true that I have my own folders in xp set as lists, and the windows 7 machine I tried wasn't mine, I just wasn't sure whether all those buttons and random controls were part of the interface or could be disabled. Beware the grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
Well tom I aggree with you, except for one ms has shown they don't or won't want to put accessability in a phone. If what you say is true, then in a few years or so we will all run android os on our pcs and I look foreward to that day!! Windows touch will not be as accessable as other tablet oses like iphone or android. ANd until it is we will have to be annoyed by it not being so. Saying that, I have a friend in the education industry and it seems its going back to 34 grand braille note tablets running windows ce so maybe if it ever dropps as you say we will be carrying round several of those gismos. I wander what that will do to the existing audiogames industry. At 08:31 a.m. 13/03/2012 -0400, you wrote: Hi Dark, Well, I think you know the answer to that already. Microsoft is out to make money, and in order to stay competitive they have to follow whatever trends are popular in the technology market. Since tablets, smart phones, PDAs, and other handheld devices have become the rave over the last few years simply updating XP won't do. They need to redesign the entire user interface from the ground up for those handheld devices. Since the same technology is being ported to the PC market as well Microsoft is simply building the same interface into the desktop OS as for mobile devices, because its more intuitive for a sighted user. VI users are always going to take a backseat to sighted users simply because intuitive visual user interfaces is what drives the market. For example, lets assume you have Windows 8 running on a tablet PC. Now, if you are using a touchscreen you can point at a icon on your taskbar, tap it twice with your finger, and open the app up just like that. It doesn't require navigating menus etc as everything you pin to the taskbar is right there just a finger point away. Its intuitive, easy, and I suppose better for sighted users as they don't even need a mouse to point and click on icons to open them up. Its the next generation user interface, and its being driven by people's exposure to Droid and iPhones. This is just speculation on my part but the way tablet PCs and smart phones are going I look for the standard desktop or laptop to be ancient history by the next decade. Businesses may still continue to use desktop PCs, but the average home user will probably be carrying around tablets running the latest version of Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, Linux, etc just because of the convenience of smaller more handy computers. My dad who just retired last year doesn't go anywhere without his Droid phone. Its not just a phone for him because I've seen him watch movies on Youtube, play games, take notes on it, browse the web, read e-mail, etc all from his phone. He rarely boots his desktop computer, because he can do most things from his phone. This is happening all over the world right now, and that's a very good reason why XP and other traditional desktop operating systems like it are running on borrowed time. Eventually, the handheld market will push the PC industry into adopting newer interfaces like Windows 8 and touchscreens to remain competitive. Weather we like it or not blind computer users will have to adapt to it sooner or later, because we have little say or choice in the matter. That's why I use Windows 7 and will likely upgrade to Windows 8 when it comes out. Eventually, I'll have to change and my philosophy is, better get use to it sooner than later. Cheers! On 3/13/2012 7:41 AM, dark wrote: Yep, once again why can't microsoft just continue xp? :D. Goodness knows what will happen with access tech and windows 8, it's a shame after very stable access to xp that things are moving in this direction, but once again because vi users are a minority we get the short end of the stick. I have at least heard that ribbons are so disliked they're coming out of windows 8, and I've also heard windows 8 has 16 bit compatibility, so there are at least a couple of pluses there albeit small ones. Beware the grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the
Re: [Audyssey] Monopoly
And wwhere are the still existing computer or netbook and laptop users whoose hardware doesn't have touchscreen capabilities? Do they think at all? Surely, android might look nice, but what is more important, the look or the functionality? And who exactly thinks that the visual design of Android or IOS is cool? And moreover, Android and IOS devices are not exactly like a desktop computer, so why should a desktop computer have the interface of another device in the first place? Why must it all be alike? --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
