Here's the message trail from one Louis Louw, application developer at Spacial Audio, the maker of SAM Broadcaster.
On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 09:25:29 +0200, "Louis Louw" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hi Steve, I can remember talking to you a long time ago and please accept my apologies that SAM3 is not more user-friendly to blind users. SAM3 was "rushed" out due to technical, economical and legal reasons and there was no time to focus on anything else other than the new audio engine. Through the years I have known many blind broadcasters and better support for them has always been in the back of my mind when I develop, but unfortunately the environment I develop in and the method I use sometimes makes it very hard to support screen readers properly. I use Delphi and I use what is called "frames" in Delphi a LOT. Delphi also have what they call "non-windowed" controls which I use a lot, and which is hard for a screen reader to pick up. When SAM2 was developed we had the vision that we would generate a completely new GUI for blind users - much more simplified and only using controls and descriptions easily read by any screen reader. During the development of SAM2 we quickly realized that we unfortunately not have the time or budget to justify this :( My time is very limited at this stage due to many huge projects that is already behind schedule, but I would like to slowly start working with you to eventually provide acceptable support to the blind community. I think step 1 would be to identify the sections of SAM3 that is a) Easy, b) OK, c) Impossible to use. Step 2 is to identify the most common actions which is hard to do. Maybe I can create one blind-friendly window containing shortcuts, buttons and actions to do the most common operations? And with some added luck, maybe we can train the screen reader to properly read the remaining sections of SAM. I think it would definately help once I understand better how these operate. Looking forward to your reply. Sincerely, Louis Louw Spacial Audio Solutions, LLC http://www.spacialaudio.com http://www.audiorealm.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Steve Matzura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2005 6:03 AM Subject: [Development - Software] SAM Used by Blind Broadcasters > I'm not sure which of your companies I should be contacting, but I have a rather long story. Before clicking your delete key, I ask you to please hear me out first. > > When SAM Version 2 came out strongly over a year ago, I downloaded and attempted to use it. Being totally blind, I use software enhancements to Windows which read the contents of screens, indicate Windows datatypes such as edit fields, combo boxes, list views, tree views,--standard Windows interface elements. There are two major programs which do this so-called screenreading--one's called JAWS (<J>ob <A>ccess <W>ith <S>peech), one's called Window-Eyes. They're from two separate and distinct companies. Window-Eyes picks up the informatioin from the SAM screens a lot better than JAWS does, for some reason. This is very odd because for the most part, the two programs can read nearly every kind of Windows element identically well or identically bad. > > Be that as it may, I wrote to the SAM folks way back when, asking if they would like to work with a team of blind broadcasters to help increase the accessibility of SAM. I was told that there was a push to develop Sam Version 3, and when that was over, they'd talk with us again. OK, V3 is out there. I own a copy. So do others in my position. And frankly, because neither of the two screenreaders work perfectly with SAM and because no one from either Spacial Audio or Audio Realm has talked with us about how our software works and how to properly interface it with SAM, we feel we're being left out of accessibility to something we really want. Many of us work for an Internet station with four simultaneous 24-by-7 streams, using other broadcast tools. Yours has superior features to the ones we're now using, such as the whole concept of databasing track information, the request feature via HTML, the multi-stream/media encoder, etc. OK, we can buy the encoder separately, that's certainly true, but it's the whole package we're interested in using, not just selected parts. In other words, we are a consumer group with disposable income disposed toward spending it on your product, but the couple two three of us who've tried it haven't gotten very far along with it because of the way it works with our screenreading technology, so we are disinclined to recommend it as a solution for broadcasting. > > What I would like is to work with someone on the SAM project, I would represent my group of blind broadcasters, your guy would represent your group of software engineeers, I could show you our access technology, you could try it and see where the pitfalls are (of course, I'd show them to you individually). Both screenreading programs have lots of ways to detect things about Windows environments and present them to the user in meaningful ways--JAWS has a scripting language, Window-Eyes has control files that tell it how to behave in certain circumstances, all of which are user-modifiable to suit the needs of individual programs. For instance, without scripts, JAWS users couldn't use Microsoft Word or Internet Explorer at all, because the scripting language modifies how JAWS behaves in the presence of various sets of conditions. I believe that in the case of SAM, it would be much the same. We, the JAWS users and the Window-Eyes users of the world, just need to know a little bit about how things are done on the screen--window handles, control ID's, etc.--and tell our screenreaders in their own language what they're seeing and how to handle them. For this, we need a SAM development person who could give us some time--a few hours probably in the beginning, less as we go along and firm things up inside of the two screenreaders. Making this product more accessible would invite others to want to purchase and use it. Of course, there are no gurarantees--no guarantee that we even could make the things work better even with your help, and no guarantee that if we were able to do so, that folks would run out and buy it, but the way I see it, from my perspective as someone who already owns a product they can't really use, at least if we tried to get something working between us, there would be less bad press in the blindness Internet broadcasting community about it than there would be if we didn't get something going, and in my unhumble opinion, bad press leads to no sales while good press leads to endless possibilities of sales. > > If you are interested, and if you know the name of someone in your organization that can work with us, please have them get back to me at their earliest convenience. > > Thanks in advance. > -- > Steve Matzura > Resources Coordinator > ACB Radio Interactive > http://interactive.acbradio.org > Tel: (888) 628-0872 > > > _______________________________________________ PC-Audio List Help, Guidelines, Archives and more... http://www.pc-audio.org To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This list is a service of MosenExplosion.com. 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