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Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

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Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#91

Post by bitwize »

alkonaut wrote: post #24

I wonder how many times in a regular day a blind person nearly throws thew computer out the window because some application randomly does something inaccessible and they get stuck. Some tray app from dell popping up a dialog about your trial backup subscription expiring, with no standard/accessible UI? Things like that. This is what surprises me most about not having a screen. I get that a blind person doesn't NEED t…

If your screenreader is any good, it'll be a piece of proprietary software that knows how to OCR the framebuffer and doesn't give a shit about "standard" UI.

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#92

Post by yorwba »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #89
yorwba wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want something even more bare-bones than ex or ed, you could use cat as a write-only editor. In combination with head and tail, replacing parts of a file would be possible as well.

Or sed, which for many editing purposes is probably easier to use.

Sure, but sed is basically just ed in non-interactive mode, so not very different from ex. And ex on my system is basically just vim without instant redraw after each change. And then you're back in terminal-GUI land.

It's interesting how the ancestors of modern editors are still around as living fossils ...

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#93

Post by dingo_bat »

torgoguys wrote: post #44
seanwilson wrote: post #5

> A screen reader intercepts what's happening on the screen and presents that information via braille (through a separate braille display) or synthetic speech. And it's not the kind of synthetic speech you hear in today's smart assistants. I use a robotic-sounding voice which speaks at around 450 words per minute. After listening to the English sample....maybe I'm being naive but is it typical to be able to understan…

You work your way up to it. Open up a podcast app and start listening at 1.5x. After a while (days to weeks), that becomes comfortable. Then work your way up to 2.0x. Once you're at that point, listening to familiar shows (familiar people/voices), at 1.0x makes them sound drunk. They seem. to. speak. so. slooow. Some podcasts I listen at 3x which feels near my limit of comfort (comprehension drops off at speeds highe…

When you listen to a podcast at 3x do you focus solely on the podcast or are you able to do something else too? For example cooking? Or driving?

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#94

Post by kdelok »

WalterBright wrote: post #80
jareds wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a blind developer and I've found Windows 10 to be pretty good about not throwing up popups if you configure it well. This is because we have a good IT group who builds machines from scratch so there's no trial software. I build my personal computers from scratch so install the OS avoiding junk software. When Windows does have notifications it's pretty good about putting them in the notification center so I can lo…

I think the D programming language site is accessible to the blind, but I don't know what inadvertent accessibility problems there might be with it. If you could please have a look and let me know about any difficulties, I'll get them taken care of. https://dlang.org/

The Khan Academy people wrote a JS script called tota11y that will let you inspect your site: http://khan.github.io/tota11y/

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#95

Post by alkonaut »

bitwize wrote: post #91
alkonaut wrote: post #24

I wonder how many times in a regular day a blind person nearly throws thew computer out the window because some application randomly does something inaccessible and they get stuck. Some tray app from dell popping up a dialog about your trial backup subscription expiring, with no standard/accessible UI? Things like that. This is what surprises me most about not having a screen. I get that a blind person doesn't NEED t…

If your screenreader is any good, it'll be a piece of proprietary software that knows how to OCR the framebuffer and doesn't give a shit about "standard" UI.

It's still very difficult to navigate it if I make a custom drawn UI, even if you can read what the text on the form says.

Typically these crap apps have custom drawn widgets and buttons with no tab-order, no way to click without using mouse etc. The screen reading bit is pretty easy (fallback to OCR, as you mentioned). But once the screen reader says "please click this button" and there are no (known) buttons on the form, you are stuck.

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#96

Post by mwcampbell »

yorwba wrote: post #11
nerdponx wrote: post #3

What about Notepad++ makes it work with screen readers while Sublime and Atom don't?

From https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ ..., Notepad++ is written in C++ and uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program size. And which lets it piggy-back on Windows' accessibility features, which seem to be quite good. I guess Sublime Text and Atom draw their own GUIs to get more control over the look-and-feel, but don't add the necessary hints to make screen readers work.

You're right about the advantage of using standard Win32 controls. But you omitted an important part of that sentence you quoted from the website: "Based on the powerful editing component Scintilla". Scintilla is indeed a custom control, and it doesn't implement either of the Windows accessibility APIs (UI Automation or Microsoft Active Accessibility, let alone MSAA's unofficial extension IAccessible2). So why does it work with a screen reader?

First of all, Scintilla doesn't work with all screen readers. I know for sure that it doesn't work with Narrator. So why does it work with NVDA, the OP's choice of screen reader?

The answer is basically an accident of Windows's history. Going back to the very beginning, the main way that an application queried or manipulated a Windows control was by sending it window messages. Because early versions of Windows had cooperative multitasking and no security, any application could send messages to any other application's windows. Presumably for backward compatibility, or perhaps because nobody thought to do it differently in the 90s, this openness was carried forward into Win32, including Windows NT. Some limitations have been added for security, particularly in Vista, but basically, if any two apps are running under the same user account, they can send window messages to each other.

It turns out that this capability is very useful for screen readers and other assistive technologies. Even after Microsoft introduced the Active Accessibility API sometime between Windows 95 and Windows 98, that API had some gaps, particularly when it came to working with editable text controls and multi-column list views. Screen readers worked around these deficiencies by using the window messages provided by these standard controls.

So, Scintilla exposes its own window messages, and NVDA uses those to make it accessible. I do wonder why Scintilla took this route, especially since it's multi-platform. It could have simply exposed a C API. In that case, it would be much less accessible (completely inaccessible if it uses something newer than GDI to render its text), unless it implemented UI Automation or IAccessible2. So, really, screen reader users just got lucky in this case.

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#97

Post by cuckcuckspruce »

freehunter wrote: post #30
alkonaut wrote: post #24

I wonder how many times in a regular day a blind person nearly throws thew computer out the window because some application randomly does something inaccessible and they get stuck. Some tray app from dell popping up a dialog about your trial backup subscription expiring, with no standard/accessible UI? Things like that. This is what surprises me most about not having a screen. I get that a blind person doesn't NEED t…

I'm wondering if they use screen sharing. It'd be dead simple to share your screen to someone and have them look at it, you don't even need your own monitor.

I wonder what the pair-programming experience is like when you have one vision impaired programmer and one sighted developer. Anyone here have experience with this?

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#98

Post by icebraining »

4lun wrote: post #55
wildpeaks wrote: post #49

On a related note, I wish Youtube had an option to play a video faster than 2X (other then downloading the video to play in a local viewer like VLC). Even as a sighted individual, listening to conference talks at high speed is convenient (and you can still pause if you want to look deeper into something).

I have the same wish. Though not ideal, you can work around it in the console quite easily: document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 3

Just create a bookmark with that code prefixed by "javascript:", then it becomes 1-click to activate:

    javascript:(function(){document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 3;})();

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#99

Post by CyberDildonics »

WalterBright wrote: post #80
jareds wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a blind developer and I've found Windows 10 to be pretty good about not throwing up popups if you configure it well. This is because we have a good IT group who builds machines from scratch so there's no trial software. I build my personal computers from scratch so install the OS avoiding junk software. When Windows does have notifications it's pretty good about putting them in the notification center so I can lo…

I think the D programming language site is accessible to the blind, but I don't know what inadvertent accessibility problems there might be with it. If you could please have a look and let me know about any difficulties, I'll get them taken care of. https://dlang.org/

> have a look

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#100

Post by bitwize »

alkonaut wrote: post #95
bitwize wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your screenreader is any good, it'll be a piece of proprietary software that knows how to OCR the framebuffer and doesn't give a shit about "standard" UI.

It's still very difficult to navigate it if I make a custom drawn UI, even if you can read what the text on the form says. Typically these crap apps have custom drawn widgets and buttons with no tab-order, no way to click without using mouse etc. The screen reading bit is pretty easy (fallback to OCR, as you mentioned). But once the screen reader says "please click this button" and there are no (known) buttons on the…

Synthetic mouse clicks.

These are pretty much solved problems. I know because Nuance solved them. Dragon Naturally Speaking both OCRs the screen and sends synthetic mouse clicks to windows that use custom UIs, such as Microsoft Office, when you say something like "click OK".

Implementing this in an accessibility suite for the blind is definitely doable. It would be tedious and take a lot of testing to get right, but that's why the best solutions are proprietary.

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