Re: Mozilla - like JAWS or like Hal?

["david poehlman" <poehlman1 comcast net>]

I agree, suporting audio css might be interesting so that we could perhaps
make our own for styling purposes and instead of say link, we could have
ding link and such.  I'm after functionality for screen reading and
preservation of look and feel for a number of reasons.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Saqib Shaikh" <me saqibshaikh com>
To: <gnome-accessibility-list gnome org>
Sent: Saturday, May 01, 2004 12:06 AM
Subject: Mozilla - like JAWS or like Hal?


Hi

I ve been following the thread regarding Mozilla 1.7 RC1 acccessibility.
I'd like to make some comments based upon my experience with two Windows
screen readers - JAWS and Hal.

JAWS effectively textualises the screen: it inserts the word "link" or
"visited link" into the text of its virtual buffer, and also inserts words
like "list of x items" or "table with x columsn and y rows".  If you copy
and paste from JAWS into a text editor you'll get this textual
representation.

In contrast Hal takes the approach of leaving the screen just the way it is,
and reading what is actually there.  It has a virtual focus mode, but this
is more like a reinterpretation of the graphical screen, not a textual
replacement.

Likewise in Mozilla's text browsing mode I'd like links to be coloured and
underlined, but no word "link".  Likewise Headings should be bold or
whatever, and tables/lists/frames should look like what they are.  So what
we have is a version of the main page, but with the ability to cursor up and
down, select text with the keyboard, do text finds within the document, and
also maybe have a list of links/headings/frames appear at the press of a
keystroke.  This is all quite general functionality that is acceptable IMHO
in a text browsing mode, but which doesn't make it a screen reader only
browsing mode.

Then Gnopernicus should be given enough semantic knowledge of the document
that when it comes across a link it should know whether it is a visited link
or not, and when inside a table, even though Mozilla's table navigation
commands will be used, Gnopernicus should represent the table in
speech/braillle in the appropriate fashion.

I think this is the best way to present this UI, but would appreciate any
comments.

Saqib


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