Also, research findings are not laws of nature. There is variation in research subjects as much of human behavior falls on a continuum often expressed statistically using the standard normal curve. In other words, what David described below was probably observed, but this doesn't mean all participants processed the webpage content in the way described. One would have to read the entire research David alluded to below, but knowing a thing or two about stats and human psychology, I'm pretty sure I can support my point. Off the top of my head there was no mention about degree of vision loss, amount of experience with a computer, age of participants, and familiarity with task requested of blind people, etc, etc. Often it is difficult to find a large group of blind research participants, so blind-folded sighted participants are used to represent blind people and researchers collect their data using this "proxy" population of blind computer users. I need not go on any further as I'm sure you get the point; I just wanted to explain how research findings are collected for those who may think that just because information comes from research it is law. Let's not forget that with replication of the study using a different population and slightly different procedures the hypothesis of the research can come tumbling down like a house of cards.
LS----- Original Message ----- From: "David Chittenden" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2013 5:26 PM Subject: Re: An oddity with contactsLike I said, I can reliably reproduce the problem by briefly hesitating before performing the gesture. Otherwise, I never experience the problem, even on webpages.
Specific to webpages, when the webpage is large and in multiple columns, headings very easily jump when what I describe happens. This is because the multi-columns are not linear like we blind people perceive them. Your first heading may be near the top on the left side of the display. Your next heading may be near the bottom of the left side. Your third heading may be one-third the way down in the middle of the display. Your next heading may be half way down the middle of the display. Your next heading may be at the bottom of the middle of the display. Your final four headings may be spaced along the column on the right-hand side of the display. So, using a vertical flick set to headings, with just a little hesitation before the flick, can cause your headings to jump seemingly unpredictably, whilst attempting to navigate the display. Consider that you hesitate between headings whilst deciding whether to move to the next heading, and your finger is closer to the display than you think.
From various studies, we know that, based on how windows screen readers havealways presented information in a serial manner, blind people perceive web pages as being long columns of text on the left side of the web page.
One study set a tactile button in the middle of the computer screen a little below the centre. Using a tactile mouse, blind people, and sighted people under blindfold, tried to locate and click on the button. The sighted people took a fair amount of time to locate the tactile button. Over half the blind people were unable to locate the tactile button. Whilst the sighted people explored the web page from side to side, top to bottom, the blind people stayed on the left edge of the display and kept searching up and down in the left side only. This is very significant as it shows how blind people mentally visualise and comprehend webpages.
Another study used eye-tracking equipment to assess exactly how sighted people determine relevance of webpages, and compared this with blind people. The vast majority of websites display link bars / tool bars down the left side, across the top, and down the right side of the page. the main text of the page is in the middle, surrounded by these bars. The sighted person first looks at the two or three links in the upper left corner of the page. They then look at the main text of the page. Only after that do they go back and look at the other link bars. Because the screen reader goes from left to right, top to bottom, in a serial, linear manner, and because all the link bars start above the main text area, the blind person must go through all the bars first. This creates the mental impression that everything is on the left side above the text. This visualisation is subconscious, and it is what we do automatically.
Since I've learned all of this from my research, I have been using my iPhone to retrain my mental visualisation of webpages to make it similar to what sighted people perceive. I no longer start at the beginning of the webpage. I touch the display and find where the actual text starts. I also slowly explore the page to find multiple columns of text. When I am ready to start reading, I use a two-finger flick down to read from my current location. This is, in fact one of the biggest reasons I want an iPad. I want to better train myself on fully understanding the visual lay-out of webpages so I can better and more quickly find information the way sighted people do (considering that websites are designed for the sighted, and relatively few will ever be designed for the blind given that we are one of the smallest minorities of people around). Besides, it will greatly improve my research skills.
Oh, I almost forgot, sighted people were found to assess a webpage for relevance usually within 5 seconds. It took blind people 10 seconds to three minutes just to find the information on familiar webpages.
Finally, title and author information for these studies is available upon request. Unfortunately, I cannot provide the actual text as it is copyrighted.
David Chittenden, MSc, MRCAA Email: [email protected] Mobile: +64 21 2288 288 Sent from my iPhone On 26/04/2013, at 11:34, "Raul A. Gallegos" <[email protected]> wrote:
It is very odd for sure. I have never seen this problem on my 4S. I have over 300 contacts in my phone of the same model and have never experienced this problem. So Innoway I am glad to know that others are having this issue even though it is annoying.---Sent from Raul's iPhone - (832) 554-7285. Please excuse any dictation or auto complete errors.On Apr 25, 2013, at 5:57 PM, "Neal Ewers" <[email protected]> wrote:I have actually had my wife who has vision look at my contacts because I atfirst thought there was something wrong with them because the letterheadings did not match up with the names of the contacts. They looked fineto her, so I assumed it was a voiceover problem. Nice to have more clarification on this. Neal -----Original Message-----From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On BehalfOf Cristóbal Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2013 5:42 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: An oddity with contacts This has to do with the headings bug mentioned in earlier messages. It's annoying as all get out.You'll find it in other apps such as Safari when visiting webpages with lots of headings. VO gets placed all over the place when trying to swipe through.Oddly enough though, the NFB Newsline app seems to work fine. I wrote Apple about this the other day and I actually got a response particular to my message and not just the standard "We appreciate your message and will forward it to the proper department." Or some such.They said that they were aware of the problem and were investigating it, but could not say more beyond that. So basically we have to wait for a fix if atall in the next iOS release. -----Original Message-----From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On BehalfOf Raul A. Gallegos Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2013 3:31 PM To: ViPhone List Subject: An oddity with contacts Hello all. The following is a weird problem that one of my clients isexperiencing and I am not sure how to help them. This is all in the contactslist. From what I can tell the contacts are in alphabetical order the way the client wants them to be. They are set up to sort by last name, firstname. And display by first name, last name. This is all good. The problem is if you are flicking to the right and you come across the letter C the next contacts which are displayed all start with D. Then as you keep flicking tothe right and you eventually get to the letter E, the contacts after that start with D. I set the rotor to headings and am experiencing weirdnessthere as well. As I flaked down I would hear things like a, B, H, E, F, P, H. So it is as if things are being misread. However if I hear a letter out of turn, I touch the screen to see what is there and the correct contact forthe letter it is supposed to be is actually displayed. This is telling me that voiceover is actually speaking different letters in the headings forthe categories but those letters are not correct. So in my example above the G is missing. Yet if I stop on that missplaced the letter the contacts for G are actually spoken. I have never seen this happen before and I am not surewhat to do to fix it. At first I thought the client might have been left flicking instead of right flicking, but that's not the case. --- Sent from Raul's iPhone - (832) 554-7285. Please excuse any dictation or auto complete errors. --You received this message because you are subscribed to the "VIPhone" GoogleGroup. To search the VIPhone public archive, visit http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/viphone?hl=en. --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "VIPhone" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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