Week 7 Activity 3.2 - Benevolent Bill Part 2

I have just been trying out some of the activities from the TechDis presentation 'Impact of Assistive Technologies on the User'.

Using Microsoft's Built-In Assistive Technologies - The Magnifier

The magnifier splits the monitor into two sections. You move your curer over the original application window and it is displayed in the magnification window according to your magnification settings. I have never used before so I was keen to give the activities from the presentation a try.

The first was a seamingly simple reading exercise. Click on a link to open a word document and read it using the magnifier. How hard can that be? Well the first problem that I encountered was that when I clicked on the link to open the readin exercise a "Do you want to open or save this file?" dialogue box popped up outside the area I was magnifying so it looked like nothing had happened. Once I figured that out however, I was getting along perfectly fine with the reading ... until i had to scroll down the page. I moved the magnifier over to the right hand scroll bar and scrolled down a little, but because the magnifier was now focussed on the scrollbar and not the text i couldn't see how far I had scrolled and lost my place. I had to go back to the beginning and start again using the keyboard to scroll instead.

The second exercise was a drag and drop. The first problem I had with this was the format ... Microsoft word isn't exactly the ideal medium for a drag and drop activity. when you click to drag a label it dissapears (apart from an outline) and where I thought I was dragging one label I was actually dragging another and ended up putting it in the wrong box. I also had problems with scrolling again because the drag and drop activity was put together with drawing objects so I couldn't just use the up and down arrows to navigate (although now I think about it I might have been able to use 'page down'?)

Using Microsoft's Built-In Assistive Technologies - The Narrator

Narrator is Microsoft's built in screen reader for the XP operating system. When using this the first thing that I noticed was that I had made tabbing through the controls with the keyboard very difficult for myself by having lots of icons enabled at the top of my browser. When I finally reached the website I didn't realise I had got to them menu because the links were graphics with no alternative (alt) text.

I have to say, navigating this website using the screen reader was impossible for me ... even when cheated and I switched the monitor back on!!! I found it difficult to understand the computer generated voice, I couldn't not figure out how to get Narrator to read any page content apart from the links and I if I tabbed past the link I wanted I couldn't get it to go backwards. This page was completely inaccessible, very frustrating and the Narrator got pretty annoying after a while.