Someone recently raised the interesting point that they found the Narrator screen reader pronounces “3 + 1” as “three plus one” when interacting with their app, yet it pronounces “3 – 1” as “three to one”. They were curious as to whether they could tell Narrator to pronounce the ‘-’ as “minus”. Today there is…
Tag: Screen Readers
Allowing Narrator gestures to zoom at the explorable map
While making the demo video associated with Updating the explorable map to add support for scrolling with a screen reader, which shows how to zoom in and zoom out on the map using Narrator, I did feel that it was pretty tedious to have to swipe so many times to reach the Zoom buttons. Narrator…
Updating the explorable map to add support for scrolling with a screen reader
I recently had some fun building an app which presents a map, and when a Narrator user touches the map, the name of the state, county or city beneath the finger can be spoken. Details of how I did this are at Using UI Automation to explore a map, and the app itself can be…
Using UI Automation to explore a map
A few weeks ago I was having coffee with a colleague who’s blind, and I asked him about exploring a map. He said that he’d like to be able to move his finger over a map of the US, and have the name of the state beneath his finger spoken. By doing this, he could…
One story of building a useful Assistive Technology tool from a UI Automation sample
Background At the 2011 Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference (aka “the CSUN conference”), I gave a presentation on the Windows UI Automation (UIA) API. This API allows apps to find out what things are shown visually on the screen and to programmatically interact with those things. As such, it can be very…
UI Automation support in the NVDA Screen Reader
NV Access has been able to implement support in NVDA for Microsoft’s unmanaged UI Automation client API found in the up and coming Windows 7 Operating System. NV Access developers have been working on this support since the start of this year and just a few days ago decided that it was complete enough to…