Re: Ideas for Windows Media Player 12

On Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:07:02 -0700, Edu Camargo
<EduCamargo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Lately I was dealling with a Sound
Blaster Audigy, but for some reason it stopped responding, so I enabled the
built-in PNP Audio device in order to keep working... And the OS is XP
Service Pack3.

OK so that sounds pretty much up to date for hardware.

I use JAWS for Windows for any application. I even tested Window Eyes and it
seemed to work pretty fine with the program. Using the tab key I can go
through lots of buttons, trees and lists.

The change in WMP11 specifically was that the search focus was changed
from the user having to navigate trees, to searching a media library
[database]

This was done in part, due to the predicted explosion of content users
would have to browse to find a particular track, video, etc.

Naturally (it seems to me, at least), there are far more pieces of
audio content than video content reaily available.

A "typical" user would have many more CDs than DVDs, for example

So the tree based view would become increasingly hard to navigate for
visually oriented users, and I guess what I was asking was "does the
Search" facility in WMP11 work with JAWS, window eyes and the other
software - and does it work well, or just "as well as can be expected
compared to other software" ?

JAWS reads all the information and sometimes more than necessary.

I've seen a demo of JAWS by one of the MVPs who's blind.

He had it reading initially at about 120wpm, but slowed it down for us
dumb sighted MVPs to about 60WPM so we could keep up ;-))

A few of the .NET MVPs were seen reaching for their tablets, to take
notes on how badly their sites were read in a linear fashion, which is
approximately equivalent to how a search engine would view their site
content.

It is important to notice that optimized
scripts sometimes are designed to work with some programs that are hard to
navigate. But WMP11 works pretty fine, sounds very clean and the access to
some important features while you, for example, just preview a media content,

OK so that's a bonus, I wasn't aware it was designed in that way. Glad
to hear somebody was paying attention to user interface design ;-)

is better. Haven't tested the player with the basic built-in Narrator yet.
(By the way, I'd love to see Microsoft implementing a real solution for blind
users, because screen reader softwares are very expensive).

I think that's why web developers don't do this optimisation (speaking
as a web developer). JAWS if I remember, came in at several hundred £
GB Pounds.

It's a disincentive to test properly in the more commonly supported
screen readers if it's an optimisation for 1-5% of the market, but
costs around 3x the cost of typical development toolsets.

You've talked about turn-off gapless... But I don't use the WMP
enhancements, like volume levelling and crossfade. I listen to the albums as
it is and, as I've reported, there are moments when the gapless playback of
WMAL files on the player occurs without any problem, but there are times when
the player chops some samples

Sorry, I lost the original thread unfortunately - you'd have to remind
me of the original problem you had, as I can't find it :-(

And the first thing I was wondering was
exactly how does WMP deals with the sound driver, and if is there any
possibility of changing parameters.

So the player uses DirectShow under the hood. That makes it prone to
problems in any of the well-behaved drivers but also protects it
against badly written drivers for the harware.

In that regard, if there's some feature provided by the sound card
through its driver software, AFAIK - WMP should pass it through with
any [driver/config level] changes being made, without it being aware
of those modifications to the output.

So for example a lot of people have Karaoke mode on their soundcards,
but ask what to change in WMP to make the singer audio work. The
answer is usually, that it's best to look in the sound card / speaker
config for that, since WMP has no karaoke output feature to modify the
sound.

I'd rather hope that your Soundblaster or USB device, has some feature
like that which can operate independently of WMP's basic decoding of
the audio stream data.

Cheers - Neil
------------------------------------------------
Digital Media MVP : 2004-2008
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/mvpfaqs
.

Loading