Re: How to test for VoiceOver being active?
Re: How to test for VoiceOver being active?
- Subject: Re: How to test for VoiceOver being active?
- From: David Niemeijer <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 14:44:10 +0100
At 14:58 +0000 13/2/06, Mark Thomas wrote:
Hi,
Sorry for the delayed return answer, but the reason we would like to know
as we have additional assistive support within our application (captions/
voice overs), and we presently would like to know, if there is any other
"text to voice" daemons running e.g. VoiceOver and then switch off ours,
instead of overloading the user with 2 voices speaking the same things and
probably out of synch as well.
I understand the idea, but how about just allowing the user to turn
on/off your captions/voice overs. If the user discover a double voice
output they can then turn off your captions/voice overs. You can even
offer that option right up front during installation or launching and
not just hidden in some preferences. Such an approach does not rely
on any undocumented methods to discover whether VoiceOver is running
nor does it give trouble if there are third party apps generating
speech output
If your tool doesn't generate sounds then we should be OK, but our first
step is detecting what comes with the OS and then we'll move forward from
there.
Note that not only VoiceOver produces sound output, Mac OS X also has
other features that can speak for example text that is selected or
below the cursor.
Our own Proloquo software <http://www.assistiveware.com/proloquo.php>
reads the titles of buttons, Finder items, menus, static and editable
text to the user in high quality voices for a variety of languages.
However, users can either turn on or off these features, so simply
checking for the presence of Proloquo would not be a good way to
determine whether your app should generate speech output or not.
So all in all, I would strongly recommend leaving the choice to the
user rather than automatically trying to do the right thing and
risking to actually do the wrong thing.
Cheers,
david.
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