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: Mark Thomas <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 14:36:05 +0000
- Organization: Coderus Ltd
Hi,
Yes we do have an option on each page of the installation to switch on/off
our captions and voice-overs, so they can very easily switch it on and off,
so its highly visible to do this.
All I was trying to do is choose a sensible default at startup under both
scenarios (normal user / a voice-over user), as we always want our
voice-over on. Doing this was to make things slightly better if we can
otherwise if we cannot detect anything then we'll continue as usual and the
user will get double speech.
I'm wondering if we think we can detect JAWs (PC side) or Voice-over (Mac
side) technology running then we ask the user, if they would like us to
leave our voice-overs on ? And if we cannot detect anything then just
continue as with our voice over's on. Then at least we tried to do something
half sensible ?, as this would limit the user getting a larger amount of
double speech compared. To a simple statement repeated twice e.g. "We have
detected an accessibility process running, would you like us to keep our
voice-overs on ?" with Yes and No button.
Any thoughts
Thanks
Mark.
> 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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