Re: [orca-list] Some bugs with perhaps possible fixing in master branch

[Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com>]

Hi Alex,

One problem though. You assume features like this was included in some
market research. For all we know Ted Henter and the original
developers of Jaws just didn't add the feature on their own thinking
that blind users would need or want that feedback regardless if it was
strictly necessary or not.

I can't speak for current versions of Jaws, but I do know back in the
90's when I was a heavy Jaws user Jaws didn't monitor the clipboard.
It simply checked to see if control+c, control+v, control+x,
control+z, whatever was pressed and  spoke a message like "copied to
clipboard" to let the user know what action had been performed even
though it was possible nothing had actually been copied As a result of
years of people using that screen reader people now come to expect
that feedback even though a sighted user doesn't get or particularly
.need that kind of feedback. We really don't need it either but have
come to expect screen readers to do it because of our prior
experiences.

Fortunately, though open source screen readers seem to be moving away
from that kind of unnecessary verbosity. NVDA, for example, only
speaks the bare bones essentials and a lot of the other unnecessary
speech feedback you get from Jaws or Window-Eyes simply doesn't exist.
Once a person gets use to using NVDA or Orca its easy to live without
all the extra messages and sometimes is actually a plus.

On 6/4/12, Alex Midence <alex midence gmail com> wrote:
> Thought I'd chime in on this:
>
> I'm a Linux user and also a current windows user.  I find the feature
> very useful and it is rare that I find that it hasn't done what it
> says it did i.e. control c reports text copied but none actually made
> it to the clipboard.  I guess it's sort of comforting.  =)  I think
> there is some value in duplicating some of the features found in
> products like Jaws, Window eyes and company since they have doubtless
> spent millions of dollars in market research and what not to arrive at
> the decision to implement them into their software.  Those  millions
> they used to fund this research often came in large part from people
> shelling out those exhorbitant sums of money those companies continue
> to insist on charging for their products.  Be nice to see Orca benefit
> in some way from research funded in a tiny part by my little thousand
> bucks I paid way back when.
>
> Alex M