![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Facebook readers may have noted my post yesterday, when I mentioned that I was trying to resurrect an old notebook with a dead screen by using a screenreader. I commented:
"Just spent an hour trying to update a fresh install of Windows XP SP3 on a PC with no screen, using speech alone. Haven't felt so lost since 1988. It's currently on 100 of 125, though, which is a sort of success..."
Well, I've spent a little more time on it today.
According to http://update.microsoft.com I now have all essential updates installed. I'm not feeling brave enough to tackle the optional updates just yet - I'm still terrible at navigating web pages.
I've also managed to install MS Security Essentials, and currently, Ninite claims to be installing Opera, OpenOffice and a FOSS PDF reader.
It's a very chastening experience. I am a dab hand with driving Windows without a mouse - I learned on Windows 2.0 in the days when my employers didn't own a PC mouse. But much of the XP and Windows apps' UI is either inaccessible by keyboard, unreadable or just unlabelled.
For instance, stepping through the icons in the notification area, I get "icon... icon... NVDA... icon... Automatic updates... clock." Selecting each icon and opening it is the only way to find out what it's the icon for. One gives the wireless network connection info, for instance, but some lazy-ass Microsoft programmer forgot to give it a text label.
The entire UI of the MS Security Essentials consists of the following: "home... update... options... scan... exit." That's it. No legible text at all. I can open Task Manager and move between the tabs, but there's no way to sort the list of tasks to find what is hogging the system. That needs a mouse-click.
Progress bars are unreadable, but NVDA makes a series of rising beeps to tell you that something's happening. It's hard to tell how far you've got, though. The mandatory Windows Genuine Authentication installer stops at about 80%, every time, even after 3 reboots. I gave up and used a third-party WGA killer app to nuke it into oblivion.
And I've compared notes with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ednun on this. Ubuntu seems to be about the best Linux for accessibility, with an integrated screenreader, Orca - but it can read considerably less than NVDA can. Windows does seem to be the best option.
It's quite scary. Certainly I'm nowhere near being able to post status updates from a screenless PC.
(Weird font changes courtesy of the LJ rich-text edit control. Sorry about that.)
"Just spent an hour trying to update a fresh install of Windows XP SP3 on a PC with no screen, using speech alone. Haven't felt so lost since 1988. It's currently on 100 of 125, though, which is a sort of success..."
Well, I've spent a little more time on it today.
According to http://update.microsoft.com I now have all essential updates installed. I'm not feeling brave enough to tackle the optional updates just yet - I'm still terrible at navigating web pages.
I've also managed to install MS Security Essentials, and currently, Ninite claims to be installing Opera, OpenOffice and a FOSS PDF reader.
It's a very chastening experience. I am a dab hand with driving Windows without a mouse - I learned on Windows 2.0 in the days when my employers didn't own a PC mouse. But much of the XP and Windows apps' UI is either inaccessible by keyboard, unreadable or just unlabelled.
For instance, stepping through the icons in the notification area, I get "icon... icon... NVDA... icon... Automatic updates... clock." Selecting each icon and opening it is the only way to find out what it's the icon for. One gives the wireless network connection info, for instance, but some lazy-ass Microsoft programmer forgot to give it a text label.
The entire UI of the MS Security Essentials consists of the following: "home... update... options... scan... exit." That's it. No legible text at all. I can open Task Manager and move between the tabs, but there's no way to sort the list of tasks to find what is hogging the system. That needs a mouse-click.
Progress bars are unreadable, but NVDA makes a series of rising beeps to tell you that something's happening. It's hard to tell how far you've got, though. The mandatory Windows Genuine Authentication installer stops at about 80%, every time, even after 3 reboots. I gave up and used a third-party WGA killer app to nuke it into oblivion.
And I've compared notes with
ednun on this. Ubuntu seems to be about the best Linux for accessibility, with an integrated screenreader, Orca - but it can read considerably less than NVDA can. Windows does seem to be the best option.It's quite scary. Certainly I'm nowhere near being able to post status updates from a screenless PC.
(Weird font changes courtesy of the LJ rich-text edit control. Sorry about that.)
