Thread | Brutkey

I think I have an unhealthy attitude toward my primary OS, Windows. Yesterday I was helping a blind student learn NVDA. We're working through the NVDA basic training ebook, and as he listened to the section on the Start menu (read by TTS), I thought about how I don't spend any more time in there than I have to, and mostly use it for its search feature. I guess I'm going to have to be careful not to push my quirky Windows habits too much.

Matt Campbell
@matt@toot.cafe

It's good that a lot of work got done on Narrator in the Windows 8 to 10 era, but otherwise I basically wish the shell had been frozen at Windows 7. And really, most of it could have been frozen at Windows XP or 2000. There were a few improvements in Vista and 7. The rewritten Programs and Features (formerly Add/Remove Programs) control panel introduced in Vista was a real improvement; ironically it got better by using a classic Win32 list view as opposed to the weird one in Windows XP.

Matt Campbell
@matt@toot.cafe

I think we Windows screen reader power-users tend to notice anything that doesn't behave exactly like either the classic Win32 controls or the major web browser engines. This is an obstacle that will face any would-be challenger to wxWidgets in the cottage industry of desktop apps developed by and for blind people.

Matt Campbell
@matt@toot.cafe

Outlook Express was a damn good Windows email client (in terms of UI; we can critique the HTML emails with non-standard quoting that it generated). It used the IE engine to display and edit message bodies, and the rest of the UI, including the main mailbox view, was all standard Win32 controls; said mailbox view was good old SysListView32. I maintain that Outlook Express was a better email client than full Outlook, if all you needed was an email client.