-----Original Message-----
From: Martin McCormick <martin@DC.CIS.OKSTATE.EDU>


>        The GUI is not the problem. Windows is.

Nope. Any gui which allows a flexible raster oriented output system is going
to be a problem. Doesn't matter if it is written for windows, java, mac or
unix, firstly you are putting some kind of restraint to the application
writer, then you need reasonably intelligent speech generation software.
(take for example grayed text i.e. drark gray, offset by white. Don't say
the word twice!).

Actually there are better ways to get around the problems. With the office
products (and a lot of other stuff) , OLE is the best way forward. Your
speaker app can place an advise sink on the document change and request the
data in plain text format. No problem. Some windows help generation packages
do the same thing with DDE, they show an updated help style window from your
word file.

Dialogs are generally easy to deal with as they pretty much conform to a
standard. You can query the controls for their text and class and handle
them appropriately.

Even if you don't want to do it that way, they new API for remote windows
(like the citrix enviorment) could be of some benefit. (don't forget, that
is trapping the device context calls and sending them over a data link, like
the way that X works).

>        Some programs do work pretty well.  Others like Microsoft word
>kind of work, but the user of the program may not get error indications or
>other important (essential) messages because they bypassed the output hook.

If an error box appears, you can see that being created by placing a CBT
hook into your app (don't forget of course you will have to inject the win32
dll into the process of word or whatever to get the callbacks).

What other important (essential) messages are you talking about? If these
are things which don't pop up an error, i.e. are there to give us a clue if
required, not interrupt our workflow, then that again is something which
placing a hook on the text output routines will not solve. What you need is
for the software to just play a .wav file when something like that happens..
easy enough to code, yet nobody has done it.

>        Other common business and academic programs like Lotus Notes are
>utterly useless in their present form.

Surely they can deal with the speech generation people and come up with an
interface between them and blow MS out of the water? nope? It can't be
important to them either, so why pick on MS?


>        Several have touched on the main thing that is wrong with
>present-day computing.  We have lost flexibility which is why some of us
got
>in this racket in the first place.:-)

Try having the flexibilty of mind to work around the problems. All the above
is just what I have come up with in the past ten minutes. I have not given
it much thought, unlike you.


And I would just like to bring to you attention that 3 years ago I worked
with a guy who was blind who had a reader system of some sort. He supported
one of the office products. So not only could he use the product but also
the reader helped him read the KB. And he was still better than most of the
(L)users out there <G>. Yep, I worked for the 'evil empire' in the capacity
of developer support. But believe me, I was never (and still am not) an 'MS'
person. I asked to not turn up to any more meetings there, as I would always
end up in a row whilst trying to change things for the better (not a
corporate man myself. That was knocked out of me whilst I was at Marconi :-)

As a finishing note, if people think that monopolies are so bad, then why is
there only one monopolies commision :-)

Well, this discussion will run and run, but I'm going away tomorrow :-))

Regards on a nice warm and sunny day,
Catchy