Re: Desktop sounds in Gnome

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Sat, 2007-03-24 at 17:58 +0000, Thomas Wood wrote:
> iTunes makes a noise when it finishes ripping a cd 
> (which is only mildly useful to me at best), and I don't see an option 
> to change it if I wanted. Not that I ever would probably...

Apple Mail also lets you play a (customisable) sound when a particular
mail rule is matched, and Roxio's Toast plays a (non-customisable) sound
when it's finished burning a CD/DVD.

That suggests to me that some users might find an optional "some
background event/task has happened/finished" sound to be useful, in
addition to the general system alert sound.

> I was wondering when someone would bring this up. It doesn't make much 
> sense to me, as you're probably going to be using a screen reader 
> anyway, so you don't need to learn half a dozen different sounds 
> because you already know the spoken word. However, I'm not experienced 
> in this field so it'd be interesting to hear from someone who is.

I'm no expert, but there is certainly a huge amount of scope for using
mono and stereo sounds in a way that's advantageous to users with vision
impairments-- Google for "earcons", for example. That, however, is
probably a separate project altogether...

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems