Topic by sightlessHorseman 2020-09-10 18:31:45

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Hey all.

So the new laptop or tablet that I need for on the road work or which comes in handy when lugging around my normal laptop hasn't been bought yet due to stuff happening the last few months, but now, it's on the list of things to do again.

Still, the coverage of touchscreen tests with screen readers is still quite rare.
As far as I know, all major screen readers on windows, so NVDA, Jaws or Narrator have touch support up to varying degrees.

I am curious if people on here have experiences with one or more screen readers on touch devices and can give out their thoughts here.

I'm stricktly looking for touch experiences, not how easy a Microsoft Surface is to use with an external keyboard, this is not the question of the threat here, so touch experiences only.

So, did anyone try this out for some time?

Thanks in advance.

Greetings Moritz.

Hail the unholy church of Satan, go share it's greatness.

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Reply by Nuno 2020-09-11 13:06:21

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Narrator is native, so it works very well (as for narrator). JAWS works good too, you can map your gestures to actions you wish assigned. I have never tested NVDA.

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Reply by sightlessHorseman 2020-09-11 14:38:55

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Hi.

Hmm ok, thanks for that, that at least is a start from where I can go on.

I will see and try grabbing up a surface go, so the smaller microsoft tablet and see if I can set the thing up with narrator and well, from that point on, I guess it's experimenting time.

Doesn't CDSR have touch support by accident.

Greetings Moritz.

Hail the unholy church of Satan, go share it's greatness.

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Reply by Nuno 2020-09-11 15:10:38

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I don't unfortunatelly know, as my touch-screen-powered device is dead by now. I will inquire and report back though.

If you want to contact me, do not use the forum PM. I respond once a year or two, when I need to write a PM myself. I apologize for the inconvenience.
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Reply by Nuno 2020-09-11 15:17:10

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I also found out this article. This might make it possible to enhance the support of the touchscreen:
https://www.windowscentral.com/how-run- … windows-10

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Reply by Marina7 2020-09-11 16:33:52

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I am not sure if this would help, I get your idea that you do not want a use of keyboards at all. However, I actually like the touch screen as an additional feature in my laptop, not an independent tablet. This is the second laptop I buy with touch screen support, and I use NVDA.
I mainly like it because I would not call myself an advanced NVDA user but maybe in the upper intermediate category. There are many situations where the touch screen support saved my day, since I needed to move around with the object review mode, which I am not so good at using it.
It is much more easier to use that mode with NVDA with a touch screen, I did not try the experience of using a touch screen keyboard though, and I do not know if it is accessible. But other than that I can safely tell you that NVDA gives a decent experience with touch screen and you also can assign gestures.
But again, my experience is not Solly dependent on touch screen so I can't say if you would encounter problems with no keyboard.
And, why don't you consider buying something like the HP Spectre x360, mine is not so but I suppose this allows you to turn the screen with 360 degrees, so you can turn it to be like a tablet and not use the keyboard. So there you got both at one, and if you needed the comfort of a keyboard you know it's there.

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Reply by Mayana 2020-09-11 17:58:30

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@Marina7 A bit off topic, but if you find the object review mode confusing/hard to use, I would recommend trying out ObjPad. It definitely made life easier for me.

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Reply by MyDearWatson 2020-09-11 19:19:15 (edited by MyDearWatson 2020-09-11 19:20:24)

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Okay,
I will say that all screen readers support interaction with touchscreens. The difference is when you want specific things. For example, I've been unable to figure out how to scroll a long page on windows with NVDA using touch screen, not even the enhanced touch gestures addon has anything about scrolling. Narrator does allow me to scroll, but it lacks or falls behind when it comes to quickly changing speed or some settings on the go. Also, none of screen readers come with gestures for start menu or back button, or going to desktop, or closing the current program, so you have to hunt for these buttons on screen in order to use your computer. So, in my opinion, touchscreen support on windows with screen readers is much behind and unpolished.
Honestly, other than reading stuff, I don't think anyone would do anything with just a touchscreen and windows with screen readers.

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Reply by Marina7 2020-09-11 19:19:25

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Wow, thank you Mayana, this sounds a great one. I usually check many Add-ons descriptions so I am wondering how I never came across this one lol. Will definitely try it. As I said I can use it but not that good with it, sometimes I fail, so that would help.
and also another point that might be related to the topic, in Firefox and I think in chrome too, some links don't open for me except if I open them in a new tab, which is annoying, not sure if it's me or there is an other way, but usually the touch screen opens it for me in the same tab.
In these cases I try the focus mode, space/enter, insert enter, all that doesn't do anything, I didn't try the elements list because for some reason I am never used to use that one, it's a bit annoying for me.
And for those of you who wonder how the touchscreen works with NVDA, well it has many features that I didn't need to explore, but basically the main thing is when you flick right, it Moves to the next object in a flattened view of the object navigation hierarchy. This means you don't need to bother with the object review or the normal mode or any such thing, for me that makes life easier but maybe other people would find it annoying because they would have to navigate things that might not be necessary.

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Reply by afrim 2020-09-11 21:39:38

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I had for a short time a small laptop with a  touch screen and based on my experience, I found JAWS to be working much more smoothly than NVDA, and Narrator wouldn't come anywhere close to any of  the screen readers mentioned. JAWS has something like roter in iOS. and I liked the concept. Still, there is definitely far more work to be done with respect to touch screen support by screen readers.

On another note, obj Pad saved my life too. Whoever did that must be blessed.

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Reply by Skybear 2020-09-11 21:58:26

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Hello Afrim. JFW certainly does have touch screen support and I have heard demos of the JFW touch screen support on FSCast and it sounds promising as does the NVDA one. I disagree about Narrator not being able to come close to
either JAWS/NVDA. OK, there was a time where that might have been the case but that is slowly starting to change especially on windows 10 2004. I can testify to the fact that when I got windows 10 2004, I spent a week with Narrator and found that I could use it for web browseing, email, etc and it did the job extremely well.

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Reply by Nikola 2020-09-11 22:08:42

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Afrim, I'm curious, did you use it on Windows  8 or 10? Nowadays, Narrator probably has the best touch screen support. Not only this, but if you want something like a rotor in NVDA, check out the enhanced touch gestures addon found at https://addons.nvda-project.org/addons/ … es.en.html
this will allow you to do many things, and the description should be helpful to get you started. Besides, NVDA also natively now allows you  to select the touch typing mode, similar to iOS. So, I would say all 3 screen readers have good enough support for basic tasks. Jaws is the one I didn't extensively test, but I am sure it works fine.

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Reply by sightlessHorseman 2020-09-11 23:12:25

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Hi.

At 11 do you remember the episode in the fS Cast where they demonstrated touchscreen support? I really would love to listen to that and get a feel for things with Jaws.

At 12 yeah I also heard about the touch typing method now beeing a thing, i would love direct touch typing though which you also have on your iOS devices, this would make the thing perfect for me.

Greetings Moritz.

Hail the unholy church of Satan, go share it's greatness.

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Reply by sightlessHorseman 2020-09-11 23:13:18

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At Nuno well if you find out something that would be awesome. I wanted to try ZDSR out for some time now, just need to find it first big_smile.

Greetings Moritz.

Hail the unholy church of Satan, go share it's greatness.

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Reply by Accman 2020-09-11 23:32:27

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I am currently in the middle of training to get into the IT industry, and the school i am going through provided the students with Windows Ten Lenovo Laptops. I have been using NVDA and, while I can't say anything as far as touchscreen functionality is concerned because my machine doesn't have that feature, I can say that I have absolutely no problems when it comes to using the mouse or the touch pad. There are quite a few more gestures that work with the touch pad now, many of which I've not yet tried, but I've used some of them and it has been quite a good experience. I haven't messed with narrator as much as I'd like, but am looking to do so in the near future. I can agree with others here who would say that Narrator has come a long way from what it once was.

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