2009-05-25 12:13:22

So, I have this fully-functional, super-cool, ultra-handy version 10 of the Hal screenreader produced by Dolphin Computer Access ltd. (or perhaps Dolphin Oceanic ltd. Something with tunafish, in any case).
I also have this shiny new laptop that I bought a week ago. This laptop ships with a fully up-to-date downgrade DVD to Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP3 x86. Woa, what a name!
Anyway, I have this performance-monster sitting on my desk, and I boot it up, ready to explore the Internet. Scouring the Windows desktop for an appropriate tool, I see a program called "Internet Explorer". So I smash my fist into the enter-key, unleashing all the force that is in me. I AM READY TO GO! My computer, however, is not...
I sit there, looking at the screen, shivering from pure scaredness. It's Internet Explorer version 8!
And off I go, surfing to YourDolhin.com to find out more about this new IE8. And as one would expect from a state-of-the-art screenreader, Hal has got built-in IE8 support. But, and here it comes, I would need version 11.01 to use this precious program. That's not too bad, after all the people over at Dolphin Tunafish Pond Something ltd. need money too. The only thing is that I cannot quite afford this upgrade after purchasing the above mentioned monster-notebook PC. So the big question is: how does Hal v10.03 perform with Internet Explorer 8? Has anybody got experience with this combo? And... What about the free update to Skype version 4? Does that free update actually cost me a 300 euros to make it accessible?
Oh, before I sign out to sit in a corner and sob about the bad bad world, let me make a couple of notes:
- The story above is hypothetical, imaginary, and based on utterly and only thin air.
- Just suppose that Freedom Scientific and its product JAWS do not exist, so that I can't switch screenreaders.
- The same applies to Window-Eyes.
- In fact, I am running all three big commercial screenreaders and I love them all. They are just great! There's no doubt that all three are the best screenreader and the ultimate solution to go with.

Cheers, and sorry for the wickedness!

2009-05-25 12:29:19

Very amusing, you could give Dark a run for his money.

If a person couldn't afford an upgrade to insane AI... I mean Hal 11, cough... then that immediately rules out switching screen reader anyway due to the insane price tag.

Not being a Hal user I'm not to know this, but does Hal have Firefox support? If so that might have been a possibility.

I know from personal experience that IE is a weird beast. I managed to vaguely work IE 7 with Jaws 4.5 way back, but the thing that made me switch back was the fact that the control F shortcut stopped working for find in Jaws instead bringing up IE's find box. I should have realised there was a control insert F, but ho hum.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2009-05-26 08:56:10

Lol! i feel well outclassed in the comedic department.

However, having been splashing in and out of the metaphorical dolphin pond for several years, let me offer a few thoughts.

Firstly, yes, Hal does indeed support firefox and it is useable, though I find it slightly more problematic than Ie in general, so I mostly don't bother unless I think I'm missing smething on a page.

Second, often it's not necessary to have a program supported with a hal map file in order to run it. This is imho one of Hal's main strengths, the ability to pick up and use a large variety of random programs without support. I'm not sure if this is the case with ie 8, but it'd be worth a try.

Also, you could configure ie 8 to run with the ie 7 map, ----- which would probably fix the list utilities if nothing else.

third, I'd just like to point out that Hal upgrades are not actually that expensive. I believe the Jaws upgrades will send you back somewhere in the region of 250 to 300 euroes a pop, I'm converting a guestimated price in my head which i don't know, using the exchange rate from pounds to euros which I'm not certain of, so this might not be the most sure information ever.

I also believe there was something about you having to buy a complete new version of Jaws after some upgrades? Again, I could be wrong.

Hal upgrades, ----- even skipping around a few versions will only cost somewhere in the region of 120 euros, and you can continue to pay just that much for each new version forever more amen. My initial version of Hal was bought when I was 19, ----- 7 years ago, and it's been upgraded from 5 to 10 in that time, swaped and been installed on multiple computers, ----- right now running on two at once, and has only cost extra for each major version upgrade, ---- ie, from 6 to 7.

As far as the version 10 vs 11 business goes, I'll certainly be geting version eleven, ---- but i'm not sure when, and i'm equally unsure whether or not I'll bother upgrading to Ie 8, ----- unless I here it does something particularly interesting which ie 7 doesn't.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-05-26 10:06:54

I have had a similar upgrade course as Dark did. I began with an old version of Dolphin Hal about 7 or 8 years ago, they used to call it Hal 95. Then I went to version 5.30, 6.53 and 9.03. So quite big jumps, and they never complained. That is definitely a big plus for Dolphin.
I intend to keep my v9.03 for another year or so, and then I'll upgrade it to version 12, or 13 (who knows what they're sending!).
I also gave IE8 a test run on my current notebook, which will be replaced soon anyway. It was previously running IE6, and I decided that an update wouldn't be bad. So I installed IE8, and opened the main window. The setup-wizard loaded, and I completed it without any problems. Then, my startpage, which is just a blank page, opened successfully. From there, I went to Google.com for a test-search.
So as I had Google opened, with a test-search entered and the results being displayed, I finally had the time to open my Hal Control Panel to find out more about the maps and scripts that it was using. The results are staggering: it was using Default Application v3.05. And it was perfectly well accessible!
Then, I configured IE8 to be slightly more accessible by itself (for example, by disabling the new Accelerators). And I also changed my map settings so that I was using the maps for Internet Explorer 7 instead. And so far, I haven't noticed any quirks. Or, actually, just one quirk: pressing Alt+Spacebar when a webpage is loaded totally freezes your screenreader, if not the whole browser, until you hit the Escape key one or two times. But that happened in IE7 as well, and I'm sure it has it's purpose. I just don't know why it happens, as I came from IE6.
So shortly put: Dolphin did, and does, a pretty great job! I demand that they keep it up!

2009-05-26 11:07:14

I'm not overly surprised, in fact I've had similar experiences with winamp, having used the old version 3 map for many years and across many versions of winamp with no trouble at all.

I've found the default application in Hal pretty Godly as far as running with various maps goes, in fact the only major reason I stopped using V6 was to get the Java support in v7, ----- and then the increased scripting support in v9 and v10.

I probably will upgrade to eleven (In fact I believe my academic equipment budgit has a pre-paid upgrade in there), ujust for the extra scripting on various programs, ---- in particularlar extra support for difault application.

My only recent arguement with dolphin is that they dropped support for my favourite orphius voice, ----- Alan, and went back to using synthetic dave as a default for some odd reason.

Luckily it turned out alan was downloadable, but I was rather disappointed they no longer offer it with the standard Hal package.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-05-26 11:25:09

Although being an absolute Hal-fan, I usually activate Eloquence as soon as I get the screenreader installed. And then I have a specialised TTS voice for the Dutch language (which is my primary language). It seems to be based on many technologies, including MBROLA, and it is pretty amazing. Until now, it hasn't been beaten by any other manuacturer, although Scansoft is getting close. The voice is similar to the Acapella variants, but with highly enhanced pronunciation and dictonaries.
And now I must say that I am a Braille-only user for 99% of the time, running a mighty Optelec braille display, which is not mighty at all. This is another reason for me to choose Hal. I don't rely on Virtual Focuses or any type of Virtual Cursors, so almost everything is accessible to me. Skype version 4 is no problem for Hal, even without map files. Really, the only complaint I have about the Dolphin products is that huge, resource-wasting logo that they display upon start-up.
And as soon as I hit the Submit-button, I am going to fiddle around with my educational budgets and other complicated financial things. As I have subscribed to a three-year academic grade of English studies, I will most definitely need the governemental support. I hope to pay the Hal upgrades from that money as well. So lets not waste whitespace on these forums anymore, it's time for business!

2009-05-26 19:06:49

Nothing wrong with random discussion of Hal.

I actually don't own a braille display, so I'm primarily a voice person. I tend to make quite a lot of use of virtual focus, ---- in fact long before I even knew audio games existed, I was playing interactive fiction games using Virtual focus to read the text which worked extremely well.

I also imagine you've used the auto virtual focus with internet explorer and things, ---- even if Hal switches by default, sinse these days it's the best way of navigating forms and web pages.

How is the reaction speed of eloquence? I use Scansoft daniel for sapi applications, but I just find it reacts far too slowly to use with hal. In fact Orphius Acapela is the only synth I've seen that can keep up with my typing speed on word echo in Hal.

As for the logo, ---- well I've only ever known that cause problems once, and that was the fault of my stupid university pre-installed network copy of Mcaffi, ---- which auto ran at start up, detected a virus (which I'd got from the network in the first place), conflicted with Hal starting, and crashed my computer.

Of course changing the Mcaffi settings was practically impossible, sinse the network would automatically change them back, and in the end my laptop had to go into a computer repair shop who ran it in safe mode, stopped both programs running at startup, restarted, ran mcaffi and deleted the virus then ran Hal.

luckily now I'm living out of colidge, the only person in charge of my net and connections is me, ----- thank goodness! so this shouldn't turn up again.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2009-05-27 10:56:48

Yeah, I use the Virtual Focus for most webpages and e-mail messages. I don't use it to navigate around certain application windows, though. I use my braille display to reach things that you cannot get to with the tab key or other navigational keys. My riends often laugh at me because of my weird braille settings (i.e. I always use the Physical Mode with the cursor turned off). But a braille display can really simulate a mouse quite nicely.
For Eloquence... It works fine for me, but I'm not the fastest typer in the galaxy. I tend to use Orpheus instead of SAPI-voices, because that synthesizer is pretty fast, in terms of responding to keypresses as well as the speed at which it can talk. Eloquence sort of matches these speeds, and in my humble opinion-thingy it is easier to understand than Orpheus. But as I said I'm not really a speech-user, so I'm not that familiar with either of the synths.

2009-05-28 08:40:46

Fair enough. I suppose in general I'm more used to synth voices.

I've not personally liked what I've heard of eloquence from game reviews etc, ----- it sounds slightly too synthetic and the intonation is a bit weerd for my taste, ---- it's rather on par with the acapela synth voices imho, I much prefer the more human acapela voices which up until version 9 shipped with orphius, ---- Alan and carol, Brad and lucy. But as I A, want an English rather than American voice, and B, for some reason much prefer male to female synths, ----- not sure why, with human voices I have no preference, but with synths I just find female ones don't sute me, Alan is the one i prefer by default.

These are all pretty much personal preference matters though i think to a large extent.

I'd rather like to try a braille display at some point for navigation, and particularly for reading of books or fiction or the playing of games like Nethack with Aski graphics, ----- which are literally impossible with a synth, but financial reasons get in the way, and I cannot ethically request a device on my uni tech budgit primarily for playing nethack with, ----- lol!

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)