Hi all,
I was able to get my hands on Prepar 3D 4 today, and let me tell you,
I am seriously impressed.
First off, to distinguish what a flight plan is and a situation,
Prepar calls them scenarios rather than FSX's flights. It's just
better worded that way, IMO.
When you first boot it up, it comes up with the scenario startup
dialogue, a perfectly accessible dialogue that replicates the main
Free Flight screen in FSX. You have your change vehicle button,
because this sim has more than just aircraft, it's got a whole bunch
of types. Upon selecting an aircraft, it is dead simple to type in an
ATC callsign, select the airline you want and whether you're flying a
heavy. Not really useful unless you want to use default ATC, but if
IYP were to ever come back your airline announcements would be
accurate.
You have a perfectly accessible combo box to select a weather theme,
the same ones that can be found in FSX by default, or you can select
the checkbox to have custom weather.
Then you have the change airport button. The airport dialogue has
clearly labeled items for airport name, Icao, city and country. The
table of search results, while not labeled, can easily be found by
OCRing it and it will only OCR the currently selected item. Selecting
an active runway or gate for departure is perfectly accessible with
your standard combo box.
And yeah, the scenery is massive in this thing. I didn't know there
were so many gates at KPHL.
Next, you have your time and season. Again, perfectly accessible combo
boxes here, with the ability to type in your date and time if you
happen to know it, or there's buttons to scroll but honestly why would
we do that as blind people? I'll type my starting time thanks.
I didn't create a flightplan for this starter test scenario. I loaded
it up and came upon pretty much the only problem with this interface.
There's a workaround, but surely an NVDA addon can solve this.
Menus. I tried using object navigation to do what we do in FSX, but no
go here. Alt does bring up the menus, which are slightly
different--vehicle instead of aircraft, for example. Looking at the
menus with OCR, it's three right to options, up two to general.
Ah, back to perfectly accessible dialogues again. after turning off
pause on task switch, a perfectly accessible check box which state
will read, there is a godsend checkbox under the sound options in this
dialogue.
That's right, Prepar made an option to keep the audio when the window
loses focus. I can alt tab happily out of the Prepar window and still
have my engine and environment sounds. Yay for 64-bit, and modern
Windows, I suppose.
Oh, FSX pilot gave you a problem and you want to reset the scenario?
Hit escape and hit reset. It couldn't be more simpler.
So yeah, I love it. I'd recommend it 100 percent, and I got it
installed a few minutes ago, so perhaps there's a way to access these
menus an easier way I haven't found.
I'm also trying to learn the aircraft grid, but maybe there's a way to
set it to appear in more of a list-type setting.
So yeah, I can see a definite performance boost, so if we can figure
out an easier way to access the menus, I think it's worth the switch.
Very impressed with the interface so far. Believe it or not, the NVDA
progress beeps work when a scenario loads. You know, loading turain
data and all that.
Hope you enjoyed reading