Window Eyes verses Jaws?

Aug 14, 2012 | , ,

It’s that time again.
Do I spend €445 on a Jaws upgrade and another SMA or do I move to a rival screen reader. Really, Window Eyes is the only application that comes close to competing with Jaws in my experience so it is the only one I am considering. Hal by Dolphin is just so far behind that I haven’t given it a second thought. This is just my opinion though. If your going through a similar decision then I encourage you to keep all of your options open.

I’ve downloaded a demo of Window eyes and I’m currently running it through it’s paces. I’ll have to blog about this in more detail but right away, I miss some of the more advanced features of Jaws that don’t just make applications accessible, they make applications more intuitive and more efficient. When I talk about access, I don’t just need the basic screen reading functionality, I need an application to assist me in accessing data as quickly as possible.

I like some features of Window eyes though. For example, the open scripting framework allows for standard development languages to be used. This is a major selling point.

I’ll write about this in a little more detail over the next few days I hope.

20 weeks and counting.

Aug 13, 2012 |

Hopefully this is all just completely natural. Maybe it’s because I’m still not sure that it’s happening to me? I have to keep reminding myself that in a very short time I can no longer check the box that says unmarried. Yep. In twenty weeks time on this day I’ll be waking up in my parents house with the big day looming directly ahead.

Yes. I’m thrilled, nervous, delighted, terrified and thrilled all at the same time.

Now that all the preparation is almost done and everything is starting to fit into place for the day it’s starting to sink in. I know I asked! I know that I had no doubt that she’d say yes and I knew this part was inevitable but I didn’t expect it at the same time? Does that make sense? I don’t mean any of this in a bad way. Of course, I can’t wait. I couldn’t be happier and it’s definitely the right thing to do but it wouldn’t be like me to just leave it like that. 🙂

So. 20 weeks and counting. Doesn’t seem that far away does it?

Next stop: The stag! You coming?

Bose OE2i headphones.

Aug 12, 2012 |

I bought Emma a pair of Bose OE2i headphones last Christmas and I was immediately jealous.

Their very comfortable. They have memory foam pads and they fold up nice and small for throwing in a bag.

I finally got around to buying a pair on friday and I’m loving them. I was in need of a new pair of head phones. I have another lovely pair that a friend generously bought me for Christmas but I likE using them at work because the cable is nice and long and I can comfortably stretch them across different computers.

The bose are nice and bays but they don’t try to overdrive the base ranges like the beats headphones. I had thought of buying a beats pair but the comfort of the bose wine out in the end.

With the bose I can enjoy all the richness of Willy clancy’s piping or I can turn up the volume when listening to snow patrol.

I know some reviews of headphones go into a lot of detail. I’m not going to do that because I’m lazy. What I will say is that I’m very picky. I know what I like and these check all the boxes. Their easy to throw in a bag, they sound fantastic and their the most comfortable on-ear headphones I’ve tried in years.

I’m marrying a temporal expert.

Aug 9, 2012 |

Who’d have thunk it!

Emma is actually an expert in temporal definitions. The rest of the world measure time in micro seconds, nano seconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years etc. However, Emma has decided to add another method to measure time units. It is known as a Smeh. This is an undetermined period of time that falls between a few seconds and one minute.

Yes. She was half a sleep at the time, yes she’s a sleep beside me on the bus at the moment and yes. She’s possibly going to kill me when she reads this. With any luck she’ll be in work at the time so I’ll have a head start when running away.

If this is the last blog post I ever write I expect you, my loyal readers to avenge my death.
Thanks.

More really huge changes for DigitalDarragh.

Aug 8, 2012 | ,

Change is finally here!

People who have read this blog for a long time will remember that over the past few years I’ve mentioned the idea of breaking up the website into two or even maybe three parts. Although it could be potentially difficult to keep all three parts up to date, people could focus on the parts that most interested them. Well, about six months ago I really started to give this some serious thought.

I approached a few design companies and I spoke to some leaders in the online media and social media areas. All agreed that breaking up the sites would strengthen my online brands and optimise the targeting of blog posts to interested audiences.
What this boils down to is money unfortunately. DigitalDarragh.com is a great hobby but it doesn’t make money. It possibly could if I added advertisements to the site but that’s not a route I’d like to go down. Basically, my online activity can be broken into three different parts:

  • Firstly, there’s the technology part that aims to promote me as an experienced technician and system administrator. I have had a company for the last while called Computer Support Services. I do business under this company name so it makes sense to push it’s brand more openly online.
  • The second part is music. I am a busy musician with a huge interest in Irish traditional music. It is time that I push the Darragh Ă“ HĂ©iligh name on the web as being a musician ready to entertain and teach.
  • Finally, the DigitalDarragh part is where I get to relax and play around with new stuff. Therefore, it’s unlikely that this website will change much at all. It will continue to be my main blogging platform and my main online presents on social media sites such as Twitter will continue to be recognised by this name. The name and hey, lets face it, the brand of DigitalDarragh is valuable so it will remain the core of other websites that I run. For this reason, on other sites such as Computer Support Services and Darragh Ă“ HĂ©iligh the DigitalDarragh.com site will always feature somewhere.

So, for technology or music, you know where to go now.

Achil island and Scoil Acla. My thought’s.

Aug 8, 2012 | ,

This post is written for The DarraghOHeiligh.ie website and blog. This site is focused on the Irish traditional music that Darragh plays with the aim of highlighting and promoting his music. More information regarding this site will be available shortly.

I’m just back after a really fantastic week in Achil. I attended the 26th Scoil Acla. It’s similar in a lot of ways to the willy Clancy week. A number of master musicians give up their time to teach tunes and technique to other musicians of varying degrees of experience. Someone like myself gets the opportunity to focus on learning new tunes and tightening up on technique and the beginners get the opportunity to play music with other people of the same level in a very friendly and helpful environment.

Scoil Acla is more focused on learning and music than other festivals I’ve been to of this type. This is probably due to the fact that Achil island is very rural. You really need a car to travel between the different venues and you are very lucky if you find a foot path.

Classes last about three hours with a half an hour break in the middle. There are classes for every Irish instrument you can think of I think.

When I got to Achil I was very worried at this remoteness because as I don’t drive for obvious reasons, it would mean that I had no choice but to rely on the people I was with. Fortunately, they couldn’t have been nicer so it wasn’t a problem. Still, people who know me will understand that I hate relying on people to get around. It took a while to get use to.

There were a few other things that took some time to get use to as well. I don’t want to seem big headed but I was well above the standard of the pipe classes in my opinion. It took me a few days to realise that I could still get something out of them. It was actually one of the friends I was traveling with who changed my outlook on the entire week with one simple statement. “It is what it is”. Yes. That simple. I decided after some thinking to make the best of it and from then on my outlook completely changed. I hovered around different classes for the rest of the week recording as many tunes as possible so I could learn them in my own time and I sat in on a class with my original Uilleann pipe teacher, Mick O’Brian. This was the best thing I could have done. He was very critical of my playing. That’s not to say it was bad, he just picked up on every possible thing that I could improve on. This is exactly what I wanted. He didn’t let me away with a thing! This meant that new tunes I learned were played exactly as he wanted with the technique he so expertly plays. It was really nice to push my playing and to find fault with the technique I have developed in the past twelve or thirteen years since my last lesson.

One thing I was surprised at was the lack of sessions in the afternoon. This was for two reasons. Firstly, because of the distance between each pub it was harder for sessions to start spontaniously. The second reason was that to my amusement, people were actually working on the tunes that they had learned in the morning. I was amused because at most other festivals people spend the morning learning and the afternoon meeting other people, playing music and socialising. I kind of admired the culture that has built up at Scoil Acla. Again, I think it is very related to the type of environment it is hosted in.

I met some lovely people over there. So many of the up and coming Irish musicians that I met were from other countries! France, Italy and even Japan had great representation. It’s so funny to introduce yourself to a lovely fiddle player or harpist at the end of a set of tunes to hear a foreign accent respond to your greeting.

I don’t think I’ll be back at Scoil Acla next year but I really enjoyed it this year! I really think every musician should be willing to go back for a lesson about every ten years. It’s a surprisingly rewarding experience to have new ideas to incorporate. No matter how good we think we are, there’s always someone who does something better. Someone asked me why I was bothering to take a class. My response was simple. The day I stop learning is the day I stop playing. No matter how experienced you are or no matter long your playing there’s always something new to try.

Uilleann pipes – Made in Japan.

Aug 6, 2012 | ,

It use to be a joke among musicians that it was only a matter of time that if you looked at a set of Uilleann pipes, sooner or alter you’d see a sticker saying made in Japan. well, that time has come! But it’s not what you think. A maker by the name of Makoto is making some of the nicest pipes I’ve ever played. Their such a comfortable set and they sound so nice that I knew I was going to come home and write a quick blog post as soon as I could. Go visit Makoto’s site and see for yourself.

A nice piper, a nice pipe maker and seriously, he slaggs as good as any Irish person. 🙂

Thought’s about the Mac; post 2 – Tips and tricks.

Jul 27, 2012 | , ,

It’s funny how easy it is to get motivated to write a new blog post when using such a comfortable keyboard. Sorry, Emma expects that I’ll mention the keyboard during every Mac related post… I aim to please. 🙂

I’m learning a lot about the Mac and the way OSX does things every day. I thought I should list some of the little tips and tricks I’ve picked up. I should give credit where credit is due of course. A lot of what I learn is shared freely by the Mac users on Twitter. Without them I think I would have found this process particularly difficult.

I’ll break these down into a list.

  • When using the YoruFukurou Twitter client with Voiceover, you will find that if quick nav is turned on replying to tweets can be a little hit and miss. Pressing enter on a tweet may result in the wrong name being added to the text field. The very simple solution to this is to turn off quick nav while in this application. This actually has the effect of making navigation around the various tables, tabs and edit fields much easier.
  • In mail, voiceover tells you that a conversation has a number of unread messages. Again, when using quick nag expanding the is conversation to read the messages in it is not as straight forward as you might think. You have to interact with the message, find a particular graphic and hit VO space to activate it. Again, it’s one of those situations where the message table works best if you turn off quick nav. To do this, press the left and right arrows together. Then you can expand the conversation by pressing right arrow. For some reason, Voiceover isn’t particularly responsive when reading messages and at times, if a conversation is collapsed it can fail to read anything at all. This could be something I’m doing wrong though. Of course, any comments regarding this or any other Mac post are more than welcome.
  • The widget area is cool! I’m still getting to grips with it but from what I’ve been able to figure out so far, widgets are reasonably accessible for the most part. I’m still looking for a nice RSS reader though but I’m sure I’ll find one eventually. I think the widget area is easier to use when the trackpad commander is turned on. Double tap the right side of the track pad to bring up a list of widgets. Configuring some of the widgets can be a little hit and miss but it’s certainly possible given some time. For example, the weather widget let me configure my locality but the done button wouldn’t work when I used the arrows in conjunction with the VO modifier to navigate to it. I found that I had to delete the county and country from the text box and re-add it again. This time, instead of using the arrows, I tabbed over to the done button and hit VO and space to activate it. I have no idea why but this works perfectly every time. By the way, when I say I hit VO, I mean that I am using the standard Voiceover modifier keys. These are control and option. Yes, unlike Windows and Even Linux screen readers that have just one modifier button, Voiceover has two that need to be pressed together. In my view, as a beginner I should add, this complicated modifier is just the start of what is one of the most mind bending keyboard command structures I have ever had the misfortune to come across. Seriously, I don’t know what the person who came up with these keyboard commands was smoking but it must have been some powerful stuff!
  • To bring up the notification bar, swipe with two fingers from right to left starting at the very edge of the track pad. Swiping from the middle or more accurately, not swiping from the very edge of the trackpad will cause voice over to stop interacting with the current control. I like this actually. To get out of the notification area, either scrub the trackpad with two fingers or press escape. Both actions do the same thing essentially.
  • To get the number sign, press command and 3.
  • To get the Euro sign, press command and 2.
  • In the menu extras area, you can’t just press space when using quick nav like you could in previous versions of OSX. I know that it was called something different in previous versions as well but it’s basically the same thing. I don’t know why they have broken the convention in this single area. It’s actually a bit frustrating. Anyway, as I’m sure you know, either press VO and space to activate the item or use the and down arrow combination.
  • Don’t underestimate the power of the Voiceover help. Press VO and h to launch this. Using the commands help is brilliant when getting started. Not only will it list the commands, you can press enter on one of the commands to perform that action. One of the commands I find most useful is in the general menu. It’s “Bring window to front.” So many windows are launched containing system messages but for some reason you can’t set focus to them using command and tab. Pressing VO, shift and F2 usually does it though. Oh, that brings me onto another irritation while using the Mac. On the Mac book pro and the Mac book air, a number of Voiceover commands such as this also require you to press the function key as well as for example, VO and shit. HOwever, it doesn’t actually say this in the commands list. It’s annoying to think a command doesn’t work only to find that it’s one of the few that requires the function button for some reason. I’m not even sure why! Almost all of the apple keyboards are the same. Why it would require the function key is a bit of a mystery to me.

Ok, my bus is getting to it’s stop so I have to go. Let me know if you have any questions or better yet, any suggestions.

Until next time!

Thought’s about the Mac; post 1

Jul 26, 2012 | , ,

Sorry for not posting yesterday, I’m still getting use to this Mac. Because OSX is very different My plan is to document my progress as I learn more about how OSX does things. of learning an entirely new screen reader at the same time. Because of this, a lot of my findings are from the perspective of a blind MAC user therefore unfortunately may not be as interesting to the sighted readers of my blog. However, stick around, you might learn something… It’s a huge learning curve and it’s compounded by the necessity of learning an entirely new screen reader at the same time.

As I was saying before, I’m comfortable with some of the more administration type tasks required on the Mac such as joining them to Active Directory, configuring group policy for them, installing different AntiVirus etc but actually using it from an end-users perspective was completely new to me. Fortunately I’m not starting at square one though.

Right, lets get started. The first thing I do when getting comfortable with a new system is install the applications that I use the most for day to day life. That’s a calendar, notes, Email, Twitter and some kind of text editor. A few years ago in the Linux world, I recorded a lot of audio tutorials to assist users with these tasks but I’m delighted to say that I don’t have to this time. I’m coming to the Mac game later than others so a brilliant website is doing a much better job than I ever could. It’s AppleVis. Go over there and listen to some of their podcasts. I couldn’t recommend them highly enough

Now that I have my mail, calendar, notes, text editor and twitter applications set up I am much more inclined to use the Mac over my PC. That’s not to say I think the Mac is better than the PC, I’m not sure about that yet but it means that I force myself to use the Mac to give it a fair chance.

For mail, notes, calendar and text editing, I’m using applications that are shipped with OSX. Thanks to OSX 10.8 Mountain lion, integration with iCloud is stronger than ever so notes, reminders and even files are shared across devices almost instantly.

For Twitter, I’m using YoruFukurou. Is that the right spelling? Ah who knows! I’m too lazy to go look. What kind of a name is that anyway? Don’t get me wrong though, It’s a brilliant application. Probably one of the best twitter clients I’ve ever used. The only thing I would say, and this is try across all applications on the Mac, consistency of keyboard navigation could do with some attention by the Voiceover developers. Sometimes quick nag is perfect, sometimes it’s absolutely terrible and actually causes applications to behave very erratically. In fairness to YoruFukurou the reason why this is such a brilliant Twitter client is it supports dozens of keyboard shortcuts making it very easy to reach almost every Twitter related task.

One application I didn’t mention is for messaging. It’s called Atium. Overall, this application is very good but if comparing it to the usability and efficiency of using Windows Live Messenger, I have to say that it’s lacking a lot. For example, in Windows and Linux, when I get a new message I expect the screen reader to announce it automatically. On the Mac, everything is very manual. That would be fine but without some kind of feedback, messages can and will be missed.

I will definitely blog in more detail about my experience on the Mac but I don’t want to make the posts too long. Come back again tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll have had time to write some more thought’s down.

How lucky am I?

Jul 24, 2012 |

In films etc people talk about the luck of the Irish. Up until now I’ve dismissed this as being a lode of nonsense. That is until I actually thought about it this morning. What is luck anyway? I’ll tell you what luck is. In Ireland, the definition of luck is leaving your rain jacket in work because it’s lovely outside only to find that four hours later the rain poors from the sky before you have the chance to get home. Some how, you manage to get home then back to work the next morning without getting wet. See? This is the definition of luck. Surviving the Irish summer without getting any more wet than you would at any other time of the year.

It’s getting a little tiring though. I leave the house before 7AM and the weather is horrible. At 5PM when leaving work the weather is either all right or lovely. Commuting in Ireland means you need to dress for every season in the one day.