There are some simple things which the developers of BIAB could do in order to make BIAB work better with screen readers and/or make it easier for us scripters to enable screen readers to work more seamlessly with BIAB.

These include such things as:

- Following Windows keystroke coventions a bit better - As I've described in previous posts, most places in BIAB where there are radio buttons, BIAB does not follow the expected behavior. This has been difficult to overcome even by scripting BIAB.

- Often BIAB has many child windows within a main window. It would be easier to script if these windows had unique names which didn't change as the user interacted with the windows.

- It is difficult to obtain status information such as volume panning, etc. of instruments. One method for dealing with this, as MAC suggests, is to have this info easily accessible in a text list or table. For Sonar, The CAkewalk folks added and invisible "Access" window which contains a lot of status info. Sighted users couldnt see this, but the screen readers could grab this info and feed it back to the user and/or take appropriate action based on changes.

I'm sure there are other ideas, some simple and some not so simple, for addressing these issues. The problem with beta testing is that by the time a revision is ready to beta test there is often too much code and/or structure which is "frozen" to make meaningful and helpful changes.

Anyway, hopefully someone out there in BIAB land is listening and can begin incorporating needed modifications into these products and/or at least starting to follow Windows coding, structure and keystrokes coventions a bit more closely as new code is developed.

Thanks, Mac, for your support.

-- Pete (the other JAWS scripter)