[Nfbc-sj] User Testing for Musical Screen Reader

[Brian Buhrow]

	hello.  I'm not Tim, but here is some feedback on why attaching to an
existing screen reader might be useful, as opposed to going it alone and
developing a new platform:

1.   Ease of use for users. If you are a screen reader user for Windows,
you regularly need to switch between screen readers, i.e. NVDA, Narrator
and, probably, Jaws to get everything you want to work.  If your new
feature set came along with one of those existing screen readers, the user
wouldn't have to learn how to use yet another screen reader.

2.  It's hard to reinvent the wheel in the sense that a screen reader must
do two things wel: gather data to present to the user and present the data
in a logical, efficient and useful manner to the user.  Sure API's like UIA
for Windows and ARIA for the web browsers give you much of the data you
need, but there are times when they don't give you what you need and it
would be useful to leverage the work of the other screen readers to help
you get the data you need without having to reinvent the wheel.  If I
understand your focus, it's onhow you present the data to the user, which
is great!  Don't hamper yourself by forcing yourself to write a data
collection engine if you don't have to.

3.  As the demands of security raise the bar on what a screen reader needs
to do to access what it needs, both from a technical/API perspective and
from a political perspective, i.e. NVDA has permission to access certain
data within the Windows operating system, but random screen reader doesn't,
you'll want to avoid that problem by leveraging the work of the other
screen readers as much as possible.  (This is a bit like 2, above, but with
the additional political element.)

4.  If you really want to be a universal screen reader, i.e. work on
Windows, Linux, X-'Windows, Android, Mac OS X, etc. you will really want to 
focus on the user interface, rather than data collection.  

5.  Screen readers have been around a long time, many people have spent
decades learning, the hard way, how to do them right.   Your innovation is
the user interface to the screen reader.  I want you to focus on
developing that aspect of the system, see 2, 3 and 4 above.  :)

Anyway, I repeat myself and we're only making a suggestion.

-thanks
-Brian