Hiya to all. I have been testing the new version of windows 8 developer preview for accessibility with the most
user friendly screen reader for accessibility that I find is the most versatile and supportive for all version of windows, compared to the commercialized products such as
this and
this for all intensive purposes, to help the blind community for navigation and other relative issues, as I myself am required to use such products to communicate with windows, in other words, I am a blind computer user. What I have found, is that for the
most part, it is very good, how ever some issues I have found to be a major problem. For starters, their are some relative flash dialogs that I have found such as the one located in the wireless network connection / view list, the what I call, modified user
tile control panel area, the remote desktop client and of all places, the windows task manager. It is completely inaccessible with the mouse to be able to click on any of them, so naturally I had to set up the network to get online through alternative means,
which involved a manual connection, you know, the dialog that allows you to set up or connect to a network that is not on the list of available networks, which may or may not be available ... its hard to explain. Anyways, through the help of a friend, using
of all things, screen sharing on Skype, we were able to pin point the relative issues, and that it uses a unique flash like interface that the keyboard is unable to latch on to anything, which causes the screen reader to not be able to latch on to anything,
because there is no external way of communicating inside of what it thinks is, is a picture, be it animated or otherwise. Flash has been a consistent problem which has steadily increased over the last few years as products have been increased, especially for
those that have visual impairment issues, because of the way that navigation is designed, the inability to work with such objects causes the need to either uninstall the software that is inaccessible, or to provide scripts or custom plug ins for unknown or
unavailable screens by default. As such, the reason why I have not reverted to the previous version of windows, is because the ironic thing is that windows 8 runs so smoothly on this computer, which no matter how many times that I had installed windows 7 because
of hardware and other internal software related issues, such as the constant restarting of the computer, the continuous inability for a network to remain connected especially in x64 systems, the prolonged start up times an a number of other factors, up to
and including the deletion of files as a frequent system restore window would pop up after a windows update session was completed. Such factors do not exist in this version of windows, which makes me realize that it was the incompatibility of hardware and
software that caused the previous version of unstable windows to behave like vista, as it was noted to be. The main issue here however, is that over all, generally speaking, windows 8 is very accessible accept for the new flash developed interfaces. My theory,
is that it is a windows error and not the error of the screen reader. Additionally, the check boxes in windows explorer are not announced, and the tab labels for all tabbed dialogs are also not announced, and also, the check boxes for the customization of
the windows features area is not announced. All of the above I believe to be screen reader errors because narrator is able to detect such activity with out failure, which leads me to believe, that it is an error or bug with the way that the interface is designed
for some, which is relatively few, yet very crucially important, windows dialogs revolving around a flash based and or unknown, unreadable or otherwise, incompatible interface to be used with either the keyboard or mouse in relative conjunction with and or
to, the displayed options for navigation. The text however is read but the ability to control the given dialog is not there. I was curious if there was a solution for this, or if this could be looked in to for the next release in the windows 8 release. Thanks,
best regards, Elshara.
