I am testing the new Beta, and have found a couple of rather anoying
issues. Hopefully there will be a fix for these, prior to final release.
If there already exists any fix, please let me know.
First of all, I have set up my system so that it should read the first
24 lines whenever I am in my net browser, and reach a new page. Yet,
when I am in Thunderbird, and open a received message, I want it to read
the whole message. That is why, I have gone to the WE controlpanel, and
under the Verbosity\BrowseMode\New Page, have saved a Program Specific
setting of All Page. Still, no matter what I set this to, only the first
line of the message is read out.
The only workaround I have found, is to hit Read-To-End on each message.
This causes me to have to open the first message, hit Read-To-End, press
Ctrl to shut it up if I don't need all the message, Hit Del-key to
delete; and repeat the whole procedure on the next message. In WE8.4, I
simply had it working just fine, hitting Del, the message was deleted
and the next one was automatically coming up and being read out. Any fix
here?
Arrowing up and down in a Thunderbird message, there is a significant
delay. Press the arrow-key, wait for at least a second, and then hope to
hear anything spoken. If you are lucky, it will happen in one second,
otherwise keep your breath, it may happen in two or three. Smiles. This
is a clear slow-down from what 8.4 would perform, and hopefully will be
gone in the final release.
In the new Browse Mode, there seem to be a funny thing going on. whether
this is intended, or is one of the natures of Betas, or even could be
due to some setting I need change, I don't know. Opening a new page on
the net, and then hitting the N-key for next line of text, sure enough
reads out the text - as expected. But if you quickly hit the N-Key say
three times, three lines of text are read out. In the old Browse Mode,
you would jump down to the third line of text. Same behavior goes on
with the L-key for links. Hit it a handful times, and you will have a
handful links read out consequtively.
OK, in one way, I can see a few places where this behavior could be
useful enough. If you are reading a page on EBay, where the links does
not matter, you could always have open the site, hit N 50 times, and sit
back and listen to the whole textual part of the page. Nice. Only, why
not then add on this as an extra feature in the new Browse Mode. Press
the Period-key, followed by the N-key, and all plain text lines would be
read out. Press the Period-key, followed by the L-key, and all links on
the page will be read out automatically. This could be a nice little
goodie of the new Browse Mode.
Still, it is rather anoying, when you know you are looking for text that
appears on the 5th text line of a page, and you quickly press 5 times on
the N-key - only to find yourself being loaded down with the four first
text lines as well.
By the way, this very same issue goes on in Thunderbird, Internet
Explorer and Firefox - so apparently not a program specific issue. I
have turned off all apps, just to test if this was caused by any apps,
but nope, it still goes on. Have I missed something, or can this be
duplicated?
If you open the Documentation (like the App Developer's Reference),
another buggy thing or two creeps up on you. Wonder if anyone else can
reproduce.
Number one bug, you will see by these steps:
1. Open the Documentation.
2. Hit Alt-S, and enter a search term. Hit Enter.
3. Hit Alt-T, to get to the Topics List.
4. Scroll down to a topic of your wanting, and hit Enter.
5. Hit F6, and you land on the actual page, and can do your reading.
6. When you are done with your reading, try hit Alt-T to go back to the
topics list. What happens? On my system: NOTHING.
7. Now, try hitting F6, and then press Alt-T. Where do you find yourself
now? On the topics list.
Under WE8.4, I never had to hit that extra F6. Alt-T directly took me
from the text of the page, to the Topics list.
Secondly, let's perform a bit more testing in this Documentation screen.
1. When focused on the actual page, arrow down to one of the links.
2. Press Enter, and the new page will come up.
3. Now arrow a bit around here, and when done, press the Backspace-key.
You now will land back on the previous page.
4. Problem is, you do not land back on the link you last clicked on. You
land one or two lines beneath. Why? Never saw this under the old Browse
mode.
Finally, while we are here in the Documentation screen, let's perform
one more test.
1. Arrow your way down through the page.
2. When you get well deep down in the material, would you please try to
up-arrow, and maybe do so a few times. On my computer, it more often
than not, produces silence for a few lines - then all the certain reads
out a line; which often proves not to be the actually focused line. This
you can determine by up- and down-arrowing a bit. It seems rather
sluggish to me. Sorry. Smiles.
All over, I see the new Browse Mode is a bit more nicely handling some
of the websites I have tried it out on. I do agree with the ones, who
have called for some sort of audible feedback on sites that get updated.
No, maybe not everytime the site updates itself, but at least if I press
a control on the page, and the page updates, it could be nice to know
when this updating had taken place. Still, I do see several controls
that are meant to be clickable, but which WE does not recognize as
anything but plain text. One such example would be on TV-broadcasting
sites, where you have to choose your prefered video resolution. The
choices show up as 480, 720, and so forth, but you cannot press Enter on
them, nor will the mouse move there.
Speaking of the mouse, I still cannot get the mouse to move to anywhere
on a webpage, neither in Firefox, nor in Internet Explorer. I thought
they said the mouse functionality was back in Internet Explorer? What
could I possibly have missed here? All the mouse does in IE, is to move
between the different menu items and sidebars or whatever they are
named. Like you can move it to the address bar, to the Favorites bar and
so forth, but not to one single spot on the actual website. Don't know
what I am doing wrong, so would be thankful for any ideas.
Again, GW, could you please let us know what benefit there is in this
ever ongoing "application Main Window" that I keep hearing every time I
am on a Mozilla product. It is tiresome, and I wish there was a way to
turn it off. If only I understood why it ever is there. Noone ever have
informed me, and noone ever has told me the benefit of it either. Sad
smiles. Hoped it would be gone in the Beta, but still hear it.
All in all, the Beta seem promising, but there still remains quite a number of
things to be smoothened out, before it could be made a final release. Keep up
the work, and hopefully some of this lengthy feedback will be useful for
something.
--
David
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