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CONSUMER'S VIEW OF COMBINED SCREEN READING AND SCREEN ENLARGEMENT

William F. Paul
Executive Vice President
United Technologies Corp.

Don Dillin
Assistive Technologies Consultant
United Technologies Corp.
1401 Eye Street, NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC 20005
202-336-7449
EMAIL: dillind@corpdc.utc.com

Session #97: Weds., March 19, 1pm - 1:45pm, Hilton "Pacific B" Ballroom

Web Posted on: December 12, 1997

SUMMARY

Assistive Technologies emphasize EITHER blindness OR low vision. Yet, both enlargement and speech can be useful. We present a consumer's view of the state of the market, and a guide on how to evaluate products for combined screen reading and enlargement. Finally, we review current marketplace offerings.

INTRODUCTION BY BILL PAUL

I am Executive Vice President of United Technologies Corporation, a $23 billion corporation with some 175,000 employees across the world. I am also partially blind. I cannot function without a combination of screen reading and screen enlargement, yet such a combination is not ready yet. The market has produced good screen reading programs and good screen enlargement programs, but so far there has been no effective combination of the two that addresses the needs of people with low vision.

This talk might well be called, "The Trials of Seeking Out Combined Screen Reading and Screen Enlargement." It is a quest that is most urgent for me, and yet most frustrating. I have macular degeneration, a condition that impairs vision in the central field of view. When my vision first began to deteriorate I searched for all of the technologies that might help me continue to function. I bought a CCTV to enlarge documents. I saw demonstrations of screen reading programs, and also screen enlargement programs, and concluded that using a computer was essential to my ability to continue working. Working with a consultant -- the co-presenter today -- I started to use a screen enlargement program, and then -- separately -- began to use a screen reading program. But right off the bat, we found that the combination of the two just wouldn't work. We spoke with the developers of each of the two separate programs. We also tried other combinations of products from other vendors.

On the basis of our three-years-long quest to overcome technical barriers to combining screen reading with screen enlargement, here are our conclusions:

First, a working reading/enlargement combination is essential to people like me with low vision, because it offers the opportunity to navigate with eyes and process with ears. Screen reading alone fails to provide the quick understanding of context that the eyes can still provide. Screen enlargement alone is simply too taxing to be able to process long documents, electronic mail, news articles and so on. The combination of the two leverages the separate advantages of each, so that we can navigate with eyes and process with ears.

Second, independent software vendors who produce the separate screen reading and screen enlargement products do not have any incentive to cooperate on technical approaches. It turns out that the techniques underlying screen reading and screen enlargement programs are quite similar. Both rely on the idea of a current focal point on the computer screen. Because software vendors' approaches to reading and enlargement have represented significant research and development investments, vendors have been unwilling to share their technical secrets with one another. This kind of assistive technology has been viewed as a small niche market, and the players are wary to cooperate with competitors in what they see as a limited marketplace of buyers. Yet this cooperation is the only way to achieve a working combination of the two types of products.

Third, there is so much change in the computer market that independent software vendors of screen readers and screen enlargers cannot keep up with maintaining compatibility with ever newer versions of operating environment (from DOS to Windows 3.x to Windows 95) and applications (office suites, electronic mail systems). This has led to the situation where you might reach a stable state with screen reading or enlargement at one point in time, but then the rest of the market moves on, leaving the computer user no longer able to work with the new set of environment and applications that fully-sighted peers have moved to.

So, a combination of the two was essential, there was little chance that independent vendors would cooperate to produce one, and the general computer market place was moving away from all current assistive technology fixes like a freight train. It was obvious to us that this dilemma could not be solved by independent software vendors alone. It also seemed to us that Microsoft was in a position to build at least a base-line product that could provide combined screen-reading and screen enlargement that might keep up with their own software products. What happened next did not provide an answer at all for the short term, but it does provide hope for the long term.

Microsoft rejected the idea of building their own assistive technology products, preferring to support the efforts of independent software vendors. In response to increasing pressure from a variety of sources, Microsoft invested resources (money and people) and created an accessibility team to provide resources for independent software vendors and also to help build a technical foundation for assistive technology in the general computer marketplace. Microsoft is now providing a software toolkit that helps make the Windows environment and general applications more accessible. According to Microsoft, this tool kit drastically reduces the technical efforts required by independent software vendors to produce assistive technology products, especially screen readers and screen enlargers. Microsoft calls the toolkit and programming approaches "Active Accessibility." The fruits of this effort are starting to show up right now, and are likely to be more evident in the months to come. Microsoft is also "evangelizing" the use of the Active Accessibility approach with major software developers.

Over the longer term, Microsoft's initiatives should lead to significant improvements in the accessibility and usability of all applications. In the short term, however, we continue to rely on independent software vendors' best efforts to make screen reading and enlargement work with current applications.

Now, Don Dillin outlines the desired technical features for combined screen reading and enlarging, and reviews technical problems we have faced. He describes how you can test the quality and usefulness of specific products, and concludes with an overview of current products in the market.

DESIRABLE TECHNICAL FEATURES FOR COMBINED SCREEN READING, SCREEN ENLARGEMENT

Before talking about our experience with combinations of screen readers and screen enlargers, it is useful to set the stage for what we expect such a combination to do.

We start out with three basic assumptions that have proven valid in our experience with low vision computer users.

The first assumption is that we will be using Windows95 as the operating environment. There are a number of reasons for this, including the widespread adoption of Windows95 in the market, Windows95's support for larger screen and application fonts (menu font sizes, for example) that help the low vision computer user, and the greater reliability of Windows95 for running multiple applications cleanly. Many DOS users will argue against our assumption, but we have found that the environment supports the low vision user better than any other past environment.

The second assumption is that a low vision computer user generally finds black or other dark color screen backgrounds and white, bright foreground text more legible than the opposite. The default standard colors for Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 are just the opposite, so this means that a low vision user generally requires custom color settings.

The third assumption is that the useful enlargement level is generally two to four times standard size. When you get much larger than this, the number of characters on screen is reduced enough that it becomes inefficient to attempt to read very much text at a time. Other problems crop up, as well, especially the "jaggies" -- stairstep enlargement of characters produced by screen enlargement programs that don't "smooth" on-screen characters. The two to four times enlargement level is workable because it is combined with other techniques including using a larger screen and using larger application fonts. We use a 17-inch screen because we found it has more brilliance and contrast than the 21-inch screens we first used, and actually was easier to see with low vision. To make two to four times enlargement even more workable, we generally use 24 point font sizes in applications, with Arial font style.

With these assumptions as our starting point, we have constructed a working list of desirable technical features that should be present in combinations of screen enlargement and screen reading:

  • 1. It accommodates customized color combinations, usually light/white foreground letters on dark/black background.
  • 2. It tracks the visual focal point in mid-screen -- not screen right or screen left where the user loses the context, with speech and enlargement. This focal point includes dialog fields, application cursor, and menu items.
  • 3. It "smoothes" fonts and reduces "stairstep" appearance of enlarged fonts.
  • 4. It tracks the visual focal point through concurrent speech and enlargement with good performance, so the user cannot "out-type" the screen enlarger or reader and lose track of where he or she is typing.
  • 5. It has a feature to scroll or pan across the screen smoothly, across a "virtual screen" so that the user can see all of the edges of the full screen, even when the screen is enlarged so that only a portion shows at any moment.
  • 6. It provides an automatic document reading feature that "reads" and displays in continuous lines the full text of an on-screen document.

TECHNICAL PROBLEMS WITH COMBINING SCREEN READING AND SCREEN ENLARGEMENT PROGRAMS

We encountered a number of technical problems with combined screen reading and screen enlargement, including the following:

  • 1. Hot keys for one program conflicted with the other, leaving basic functions unworkable. For example, one combination prevented the enlarger from turning on or off, so the user had to stay with only one level of enlargement.
  • 2. Screen reading and screen enlargement together were so slow that they did not keep up with even moderate typing speeds, leaving the user "lost."
  • 3. Many, many crashes with some combinations.
  • 4. Inability to enlarge screen fonts or customize colors, with the effect that the screen reading program did not speak, or the enlargement program failed to track the current focal point.
  • 5. Incompatibility with various video drivers and screen resolution settings.
  • 6. Some products could not be unloaded, leaving full exit and power off as the only way to exit the screen reading or screen enlargement program.

EVALUATING PRODUCTS STEP BY STEP

Drawing from our experience over the past three years, this is our approach for testing screen reading/screen enlargement combinations. We encourage you to use this approach to test demos or live products in your own environment. The test cycle will yield a lot of comparative information about the performance of each combination. Record the combinations tested and the outcomes at the time you observe them. Ten minutes later it will be difficult to remember the specific problems that were encountered unless you record results right at the time you are conducting that part of the test. You should communicate the "problems encountered" list to the respective vendors. We have found that vendors DO respond to "bug reports" and constructive suggestions, and it is worth providing this information to them and to observe how they respond. Here are the testing steps:

  • 1. Set up a test environment with inverted screen colors for the Windows desktop. (You can do this in Windows Control Panel). Then create a test document with 24 point bold characters on screen in your favorite word processor. Use this document for all subsequent testing.
  • 2. Try different loading orders for each testing cycle. For example, first load enlargement, then speech; then, in the next test cycle, load speech first, and then enlargement.
  • 3. Run through the test cycle with different video resolutions and video drivers, from VGA to SVGA.
  • 4. Turn on speech and turn on enlargement to 4 times enlargement for the first testing cycle.
  • 5. Test tracking responsiveness to see if the enlargement and speech programs both keep up with your typing speed, and also see if they keep the current cursor in screen focus, preferably in the middle of the current field of view. The easiest way to do this is to type a large number of letters quickly, using the space bar every five characters or so. I do this by punching in random letters and space bar combinations, hitting about 100 words per minute or more.
  • 6. Test tracking on menu bars by hitting the ALT key for the application menu, and then arrowing (or cursor) right to produce the menu key words, then down arrow through the first menu selection (for example, File, New, Open, Close... etc.). Does the current menu word, or menu selection, stay in center of the screen focus? Does the screen reader speak it accurately?
  • 7. Use the enlarging program's "increase enlargement" key to increase to 8 times standard size and repeat steps 5 and 6. Is there any difference in performance?
  • 8. Test hot key controls. Turn enlargement off, and then turn it back on again. Turn speech off and then turn it back on again. Does this work?
  • 9. Test for tracking and speech in dialog boxes. Go to the File Menu, and select, Save As, then TAB through the "SAVE AS ..." dialog box options. Does the current focal point in the dialog box remain center screen, or at least within the field of view where you can see some of the context for this field? Does speech give you an indication of what field you are on, and what type of field it is?
  • 10. Exit the application, and then go to the START BAR and move up and down the Start Bar selections (or, in Windows 3.1, move around in Program Manager selections) to test for tracking and speech here, and then go back into the same application. Sometimes exiting an application and then re-entering poses serious problems for a screen reading or screen enlargement program.

This 10-step approach should give you a lot to go on in comparing reading and enlargement combinations.

OVERVIEW OF CURRENT PRODUCTS IN THE MARKET AND WHAT WE MIGHT EXPECT IN 1997

From a large field of potential combinations, and with the color combinations and screen font size combinations we wanted to work with, we could not find any that fully passed our test operations. Some came close, but unfortunately, not close enough in our view to be really functional on a production basis. New products and improvements in existing products were expected at the time this paper was put to press, and late breaking developments will be included in our presentation at the CSUN 97 conference.

Here is a rundown on what is out there at the present:

SYNTHA-VOICE'S POWERAMA. Syntha-Voice produced the very first Windows screen reader. In 1994, SynthaVoice produced Powerama as an integrated, combined reader/enlarger, but we found that one could out-type the tracking speed, frequently leaving the visual focal point off screen. The product has not been updated for the Windows95 environment, although the reader, Window Bridge, is available for Win95. (Syntha-Voice, Ontario, Canada, 905-662-0565)

ARTIC WINVIS95 AND AI-SQUARED'S ZOOMTEXT. This combination could be LOADED so that they were both in memory at the same time, but only ONE or THE OTHER could be turned on, that is, you could have enlargement alone without speech, or speech alone without enlargement. When both were turned on, several essential features in each no longer worked. (Artic Technologies, Troy, Michigan, 810-588-7370) (AI Squared, Manchester Center, VT, 802- 362-3612)

HENTER JOYCE'S JAWS FOR WINDOWS AND AI-SQUARED'S ZOOMTEXT PLUS. With standard font sizes and screen colors, this combination works fairly well. However, when we enlarged application fonts, changed default screen colors, and used Microsoft Word's "blue background" option, all of which were desirable from the standpoint of a low vision user, JAWS no longer worked, and no immediate workaround was available. (Henter-Joyce, St. Petersburg, FL, 800-336-5658) (AI Squared, Manchester Center, VT, 802-362-3612)

ZOOMTEXT PLUS ALONE. At the Closing the Gap conference in Minneapolis, MN, in October 1996, AI Squared demonstrated planned enhancements to ZOOMTEXT, which included BOTH screen reading and screen enlargement in a single product -- a first for the Windows95 environment. Production versions were not available for testing at press time.

CONCLUSION

While combined screen reading and screen enlargement is essential to a growing number of low vision users in the labor force, a working combination is elusive. Recent changes in operating systems, applications, and screen readers and enlargers (especially "Active Accessibility") may provide a hopeful basis for improvement soon. In the meantime, we continue with working compromises.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

William F. Paul is Executive Vice President of United Technologies Corporation, a $23 billion corporation that is best known for producing Pratt & Whitney aircraft engines, Otis elevators and escalators, Carrier heating and air conditioning systems, Sikorsky helicopters, Hamilton Standard aerospace systems and UT Automotive components and systems.

Don Dillin is a senior systems engineer and consultant in assistive technologies. For the past seven years he has provided support to clients in both government and private sectors, with an emphasis in maintaining employment for persons with visual and mobility disabilities using assistive technology.

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