Vista narrator

J

Jbarr

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Mar 22, 2009
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Hello, does anyone know how to get vista narrator to work? I am unable to get the narrator to read text, it will read as I type but when I ask it to read the document it says' document empty. I am visually impaired and need to make it work. I understand from googling it that it has several problems, has anyone figured it out?

Thanks
Jeff
 
I have only tried it with 2 programs, Word 2000 and FireFox. It reads the toolbar over and over. The keyboard shortcuts don’t seam to work either, my keyboard doesn’t seam to like the “Insert” command. I will try different keyboard.
 
I tried a new keyboard and Internet Explorer, without muck luck. I printed all the keyboard shortcuts and tried them all, very few do anything.

Side note; I am using Vista 64bit

Any ideas?
 
Then it's the programs' fault for not implementing the accessibility APIs. The APIs are implemented for the Windows Common Controls, but programs like Firefox and Word do their own text rendering with custom-written controls. If those controls don't program for the Accessibility API, there's absolutely no way for the narrator to see it. Try Word 2007 (probably 2003 as well) or Internet Explorer.

Dear God, you're running Word 2000 on Vista? Why oh why oh why oh why. Every single copy of Office prior to 2003 should be destroyed.
 
So….is there an alternative for narrator, one that will work better and with more programs?

BTW this was written in Word 2000, appears to still be functioning after all these years, more than I can say for Narrator!
 
Narrator is functioning just fine. Word 2000, however, lacks modern APIs and thus isn't functioning "fine".

No, no program in the world can read more than Narrator, which you would understand if you read my links.
 
A quote from the link above;

re: Accessibility is not just for people with disabilities
Thursday, August 17, 2006 4:38 PM by denis bider
In general, Microsoft has a pretty bad record of offloading responsibilities that should be taken care of centrally onto application developers, at the expense of reliability and security.

Cases in point - cooperative multithreading; and even nowadays, the general reliance of Windows on programs to be well-written, well-intended and well-behaved.

Only in recent years has Microsoft realized that it DOES need to take responsibility and does need to start solving problems centrally, and the effect of these initiatives has been better security and reliability for everyone.

Perhaps accessibility cannot be done without cooperation from programs. But yeah, right. Requiring programs to cooperate is the easy way out. Let the people who develop the accessibility feature instead do their job and create the accessibility infrastructure that won't require any explicit cooperation, and then truly everyone will be satisfied.
[Windows does cover accessibility automatically if you do things the "conventional" way. It's if you decide to be "clever" -- owner-draw controls, windowless controls -- that you need to do accessibility work. It's unclear how Windows is expected to be able to figure out that your circle with a greater sign on it means "Next". –Raymond
 
[Windows does cover accessibility automatically if you do things the "conventional" way. It's if you decide to be "clever" -- owner-draw controls, windowless controls -- that you need to do accessibility work. It's unclear how Windows is expected to be able to figure out that your circle with a greater sign on it means "Next". –Raymond
Click to expand...
Is the important part of that quote. Some random guy saying "Wahh Microsoft should do magic things" doesn't make it any more realistic. Again, I tell you: Those programs have those controls custom-drawn. It is IMPOSSIBLE for Windows to know anything about their contents other than what the programs expose, and if those programs want to expose the text inside them they have to use the Accessibility Interfaces.
 
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