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phetsims / a11y-research

a repository to track PhETs research into accessibility, or "a11y" for short
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Investigate VO utility settings and their effects #14

Open terracoda opened 7 years ago

terracoda commented 7 years ago

VoiceOver (VO) has many settings. I have posted a subset here. Adjusting the settings can drastically affect what live region content is spoken aloud and how much VO information is spoken aloud.

At some point I adjusted my settings to the point where I silenced "interactive alerts" (descriptions in live regions), rendering the sim unusable for testing on my machine. Today, I was carefully adjusting my settings again, and some how I turned "interactive alerts" back on again.

In this issue, I hope to investigate VO settings more deeply.

I am posting screen shots of my settings. I will add comments as I understand them better. @jessegreenberg, @emily-phet, @jobara, @jhung, you may want to compare your settings, or share how you have adjusted them?

General settings were left at default. vo_general

Verbosity settings has 4 categories: Speech, Braille, Text, Announcements and Hints Speech at Medium seems to work well. High is the default. If I knew Braille, it likely makes sense to use the same setting for Braille. The default is high. I'm not including a screenshot for Braille. vo_verbosity_speech_medium

There are many Text settings. I don't understand them all. I reduced repetition, punctuation and added some pitch settings. vo_verbosity_text_changed_some_things

Announcements vo_verbosity_announcements_adjusted

Hints - I reduced hint delay vo_verbosity_hints_sshort_delay

Navigation settings. I think I left these at the default settings. vo_navigation_defaults

Web - Navigation setting must have Live Regions enabled. vo_web_navigation_live-regions-enabled

emily-phet commented 7 years ago

@terracoda This is a great find! I would never have thought you could have such significant consequences from changing a setting, without that being made clear in advance (or at least an indication that there might be unintended consequences). I wonder if there might be a forum somewhere with VO users discussing settings, or issues with settings? I did a quick search but didn't come up with anything...though it seems like this probably exists somewhere.

terracoda commented 7 years ago

@emily-phet, I was surprised at how drastically I changed the output with just playing with a few settings. What I would like to understand better is how VO handles (or interprets) Live Region content and its own "help text". It seems adjusting the delay of hints, adjusts both the delivery of live region content (i.e., most of the sim's interactive content) and the native VO hints.

I need to compare the settings posted above with the default VO settings and then more carefully narrow down what all the settings mean for sim content and VO verbosity. Not a top priority, but something I would like to explore.

terracoda commented 7 years ago

@emily-phet (FYI) A few days ago, I had to restore from backup. Since I did that restore, alerts are no longer firing when using the JT sim or the BASE sim. It is possible my system as far as VO is concerned has be reset to the system defaults. A good time to do a comparison of what I posted earlier.

terracoda commented 7 years ago

@veillette, thanks for the edit ;-)