From: alex wallis <alexwallis646_at_googlemail.com>
Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2009 19:27:07 +0100

snip
> They're simply two very different notifications, they just happen to both
> beep as their means of notifying you. That being said, I'm not really sure
> I understand why an end-of-list beep is necessary. If you're looking at
> the screen, it obviously isn't. If you're managing blind and using voice,
> you'll hear the start of the voice entry for the last thing in the list at
> the same time you would hear a beep if it were enabled.
This is true, however navigating without this beep and simply relying on the
speech for information to find out when you have reached either end of a
list or menu makes navigation slower. Particularly in the case of files and
folders, because just suppose for a second you wanted to know if you were at
the end or beginning of the list, but at either end you had multiple entries
beginning with the same letter or phrase, assuming you don't use talk clips
which i don't, you will have to listen to the spelling of the name part way
through to figure out are you on the exact end of the list, or maybe two or
three items from one end.
The beep simply gives you a very quick alert saying either you have gone to
far and gone past what your looking for, or you have reached it.
It simply saves a lot of time with navigation.
If you didn't have this beep
> Given that you navigate lists to get to a specific option, if you're
> scrolling you'll need to listen to the voiced entries anyway to find the
> option you want. When do you need to know you're at the bottom, without
> needing to know what any of the list entries are, including the last one?
see above, if its a massive list of files or folders particularly if they
are almost identical in terms of there names.
> As a note: when navigating with voice, can't you already tell you're on
> the last entry by holding "down" until it stops changing entries? Since
> moving to the next entry should interrupt the voicing, as soon as it stops
> cutting off voicing and starts to read the whole entry, you'll know you're
> at the last one.
I have found in the past that doing that can some times crash the player,
but also this is not a very efficient way for a blind user to navigate, as
if you are just holding down the joystick and looking for particular things
you could easily miss them. at the moment, lists and menus wrap, so I am not
sure wouldn't you just wrap around?
also, just as a note, the beep comes in a while before the speech, there is
a noticeable gap, making it more efficient than relying on the speech.
> What exactly is the intended purpose of this feature?
to make navigation easier particularly in huge lists.
I think though that perhaps this option needs its own setting, but I agree
with previous posts from this thread perhaps beep settings need to be under
some kind of category of there own. I think each form of beep should have
its own setting though as not everyone would want all beeps.
Received on 2009-06-14