I reckon that Stonehege was build by the contemporary equivalent of Microsoft, whereas Avebury was definitely an Apple circle. Terry Pratchett on alt.fan.pratchett
You are currently browsing the recent entries for July, 2005
“Switch To Firefox”
Switching to Firefox from another open application, using Dragon, can be extremely difficult as, normally, the Firefox window defaults to the title of the web page currently loaded.
Not only does this mean that you have to do try and dictate something like:
switch to web-page-with-incredibly-long-name
but, 9 times out of 10, you can’t even see the full name when Firefox has been minimised to the taskbar. So you end up either making wild guesses or trying to navigate labouriously using keyboard shortcuts.
Stop Firefox Blipping
If you’re using Dragon with Firefox, it is likely that you are being driven mad by the persistent “blipping” sound emanating from the Find box every time you mis-dictate a link or phrase.
Believe it or not, this is considered to be a feature of Firefox’s “Find As You Type” accessibility option. If you try to disable Find As You Type, you will suddenly find that Dragon no longer works within Firefox. So for the time being, you’ll just have to learn to ignore the Find box as it pops up and down but you can mute it.
Current Pet Hates…
- having Dragon insert spaces in front of commas
- trying to get Dragon to understand that I want to type the word “comma”…
The Vocabulary Optimiser
A couple of days ago, I hit another plateau with regard to accuracy. Rather than try another training/dictation session, I decided that it might be time to rerun the Acoustic Optimiser as it had been around seven days – and a fair amount of intensive usage – since I had last run it. I also decided to try out the Vocabulary Optimiser, but, in my case, this proved a little bit more difficult than first appearances suggested.
More On Popups
WAI Checkpoint 10.1 states:
Until user agents allow users to turn off spawned windows, do not cause pop-ups or other windows to appear and do not change the current window without informing the user.
Yes, we all know about this one. Don’t spawn a new window unless you really have to and, if you feel compelled to do so, inform the user. For many developers, this boils down to using the title attribute within the link markup to inform the user that the link will open in a new window. The idea behind this is that screen reader users will be forewarned about the upcoming change of focus by their own software.
Place Holding Text In Form Inputs
There has been a general consensus of opinion, until now, that Priority 3 Checkpoint 10.4 of the WCAG 1.0 Guidelines can be safely disregarded. The checkpoint relates to the use of place holding characters within text input areas.
10.4 Until user agents handle empty controls correctly, include default, place-holding characters in edit boxes and text areas.