I agree 100% with your thoughts in your e-mail below. I sent Steve the
same response about PC Suite, but it went to him personally, not to the
list.
What is still unclear to me, is why Window-Eyes 7.5 broke the
accessibility; with 7.2 PC Suite was stil usable.
I really would want to use only one screen reader and not need to use
another for certain applications.
There are a number of applications in which the freebee outperforms
Window-Eyes, Even in the Windows 7 operating system, NVDA works
perfectly with the Task Scheduler, while Window-Eyes makes a dog's
breakfast of it. Yes, an app could be written to fix it, but that
shouldn't have to be necessary to get something of the core operating
system to work properly, considering that the freebee and the commercial
opposition both handle it properly. Somewhere along the line this
slavish reliance on MSAA is making GW Micro lose the plot here and there.
Please, Steve and others at GW Micro, PC Suite is free; NVDA is free;
not too much to ask you to install them and test them and get our
Window-Eyes to at least do what NVDA can and then a whole lot more.
Kind regards
Christo
On 2011/08/04 5:19 PM, David wrote:
Just for your info. Far as I can see, you don't need a Nokia phone, to
have the PC Suite installed. It is quite easily downloadable from the
net, and it installs without any Nokia phone connected. You even
should be able to move around most of the features, without ever being
close to a Nokia phone. Soon as you install the software, and open it
the first time, you see the trouble. WE goes more or less silent. If
you have the hour to look at it, I strongly recommend you try
installing the suite, for just a moment, and see what you can get from
it.
Another question, which might seem silly, but then you know how little
I understood your reply:
Since you seem to be aware the problem, and I get it has something to
do with WE expecting certain behavior from MSAA, which it does not
get, then a natural question would be: Is there a chance - in later
versions - to have WE holding features to switch between the two
different approaches you mentioned? That it normally dos what it is
doing as per date, but then also have a chance (by a hotkey or
something), to switch to the other 'mode'?
----- Original Message ----- From: "Stephen Clower" <[email protected]>
To: "chris hallsworth" <[email protected]>
Cc: "Christo de Klerk" <[email protected]>; "gwmicro"
<[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, August 03, 2011 8:13 PM
Subject: Re: Could someone from GW Micro shed some light on this, please?
Greetings,
Mirror hooks have nothing whatsoever to do with the issue being
described. The problem essentially is that many applications do not
implement MSAA correctly. Therefore, on the programming side of
things, we assume all programs are guilty until proven innocent.
Other products do not take this approach. Sometimes it's good, but at
others it can be disastrous. QT-based software falls under the guilty
category, at least for now.
I wrote the QT Support app to hook into the MSAA support which was
made available in the accessible QT widgets. As QT development has
been more-or-less stagnant for the past few years, the approach I
created worked well for the majority of QT-based software. I can't
say what the issue is with PC Suite as 1) I don't have this program
and 2) nobody here owns a Nokia phone with which to test.
Just to be clear on the matter, I, personally, have been the
developer of QT Support. It began as my own project prior to my
employment with GW Micro, and it is still an after-hours endeavor. If
someone has a Nokia phone they don't want and would like me to find
out why precisely PC Suite is having issues with QT Support, then by
all means contact me off list to make arrangements. Otherwise, I will
update the app when ample time is available for me to do so.
Regards,
Steve
On 8/3/2011 1:53 PM, chris hallsworth wrote:
I wonder if the mirror Driver/Video Intercept has anything to do with
this? NVDA uses display hooks to communicate with applications directly
writing to the screen, rather than mirror drivers or video
interception.
Chris Hallsworth
Sent from Thunderbird
On 03/08/2011 18:31, Christo de Klerk wrote:
Hello
Some time ago I reported that Window-Eyes 7.5 broke the
accessibility of
Nokia PC Suite 7 and made it unusable. Steve Clower went to a lot of
trouble to try and help, updating the QT Support app and sending me
new
versions to try, but we never got PC Suite working again.
Now yesterday, just for the hell of it, I tried the free opposition,
NVDA, and it worked perfectly with PC Suite, no accessibility
issues at
all.
Yesterday I installed an application called Tapin Radio on my Netbook.
Nothing spoke, but it looked like an application built with QT
Widgets,
so I installed the QT Support app and it now works perfectly. Again,
this program worked with NVDA out of the box, no accessibility issues.
My question now is: Why does Window-Eyes have trouble with these
issues
and at least for Tapin radio need QT Support for it to work, while
both
work perfectly with the free screen reader? One would have expected
the
free program to have issues, not the commercial one. Surely GW
Micro is
missing something here. I think this is more than a little strange.
When
I want to use PC Suite, I have to stop Window-Eyes and then use a
freebee to access PC Suite. That is a crazy situation. Is there some
explanation for this?
I honestly hope this is something GW Micro will attend to. Surely the
commercial program should be at least as good as the free one and
then a
whole lot better.
Kind regards
Christo
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--
Stephen Clower
Product support specialist
GW Micro, Inc. * 725 Airport North Office Park, Fort Wayne, IN 46825
260-489-3671 * gwmicro.com
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can manage your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv.
If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only.
If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to
GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so
the entire list will receive it.
GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage
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