[gui-talk] windows 7 loss of speech

[Mike Freeman]

Jude:

While I sympathize with your position and, in fact, agree with much of it, I
doubt even a sound is practical. Ever tried defining a "program open" and
"program close" sound with Windows (going back to Windows-95 even)? One
never hears anything else. It's amazing how much goes on under the hoo Until
relatively recently, this held true both for the various flavors of Linux
and for thems of us who were (NS ARILL ew )denizens of OpenVMS.

I like the idea you and Doug Lee have propounded of implementing a true
multi-tasking real-time scheduling algorithm including priorities in
Windows. If this were done, I'd put keyboard input at the highest priority,
followed immediately by speech followed by antivirus/firewall software. But
this could be argued endlessly.

In fairness to Microsoft, I think Doug has a point that, with the exception
of MSDOS screen-readers, we generally used separate processors to process
speech and with the exception of the SoundBlaster sound card, even
synthesizers used separate processes under MSDOS. So we weren't fully
exposed to the problem as we are under Windows. This still mostly holds true
for Linux users and users of other operating systems such as OpenVMS.

Also, I believe that computer users (both individuals and corporations)
demand less of operating system vendors than they once did. I knoe of
workstations at my place of employment running various flavors of OpenVMS
which have been up -- without a break -- for over a year! Put *that* in
Windows' pipe and smoke it!

And yet I still like both Windows XP and Windows 7.

Mike


-----Original Message-----
From: gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Jude DaShiell
Sent: Sunday, December 04, 2011 10:26 AM
To: Discussion of the Graphical User Interface, GUI Talk Mailing List
Subject: Re: [gui-talk] windows 7 loss of speech

If not written messages then at least a couple different windows sounds. 
 Maybe incoming sms response for speech going away and outgoing sms for 
when speech is coming back and those would be on the iphone.  That way 
at least I wouldn't be trying to key things when the speech just goes 
away and wouldn't miss system responses that might cause me to make more 
informed decisions as to what to do and avoid doing in certain 
situations.

On Sun, 4 Dec 2011, Doug Lee wrote:

> Interesting concept there, but unless I'm missing something big, that
> would produce enough announcements to be more annoying than short-term
> speech delays now are. I don't know if Windows implements real-time
> process scheduling like, for example, FreeBSD does; but even without
> that, plenty of cases exist where speech is not and should not be the
> top priority of the CPU. An example is an application in charge of
> monitoring real-time events, like network packet arrival, USB
> sensor/probe data input, and even keyboard input.
> 
> Process scheduling is surely one of the trickier businesses of an
> operating system. I happen to like the experiences I've had on various
> Unix-style operating systems with regard to this, but to be fair, my
> speech when using those, up until MacOS at least, has always come from
> a separate computer, which means my experiences say nothing of the
> problem you're trying to solve.
> 
> On Sun, Dec 04, 2011 at 07:37:17AM -0500, Jude DaShiell wrote:
> Windows users need two additional messages to be displayed and spoken if 
> speech is in use.  First a process priority message that gets spoken when 
> another process with higher priority than speech is about to take over.  
> Then a process restored message which would display when the higher 
> priority process is finished with the system and speech returns.  This 
> would probably take less code than fixing the underlying lack of true 
> pre-emptive multitasking problem, but my bet is Microsoft doesn't put 
> either fix in.
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> Jude <jdashiel-at-shellworld-dot-net>
> <http://www.shellworld.net/~jdashiel/nj.html>
> 
> 
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----------------------------------------------------------------
Jude <jdashiel-at-shellworld-dot-net>
<http://www.shellworld.net/~jdashiel/nj.html>


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