[gui-talk] windows 7 loss of speech

Sun Dec 4 23:00:12 UTC 2011

I tend to think this is an irrepairable problem for whatever variety of 
reasons.  Fortunately when I retire I get to choose the operating system I 
use and it won't be windows.On Sun, 4 Dec 2011, Mike Freeman wrote:

> 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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Jude <jdashiel-at-shellworld-dot-net>
<http://www.shellworld.net/~jdashiel/nj.html>