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: Travis Siegel <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 15:54:12 -0500
Is there some method of turning on/off vo, and determining which way
it just toggled? If so, you could simply do the on/off toggle, read
it's current state, then switch it back to what it was, but in the
meantime you've got your information as to whether it was on or off
in the beginning. Shouldn't there be some event that can be checked
when it is turned on or off, I'd think there would have to be, since
Apple monitors voiceover, and when it crashes, it is automatically
restarted (an extremely useful feature btw) Perhaps you could hook
into this same event chain to see what the current status is.
On Feb 17, 2006, at 9:36 AM, Mark Thomas wrote:
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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