[Blindmath] SVG Draw

[John Gardner]

Hello all, I have several questions and comments on SVG Draw.  One question
for list members is whether it would be useful to have full IVEO access to
SVG files made with SVG Draw.  Presently, because of licensing requirements,
you must have IVEO Creator or IVEO Creator Pro to get audio access to the
SVG title and description and the object titles and descriptions entered
when creating an SVG drawing with SVG Draw.  If many of you would like to
have it, I will request that the IVEO authoring license be added to SVG Draw
in a special version available only to blind users.  This will make these
files IVEO-accessible in the free IVEO Viewer.  Don't know how the
distribution would work, but tell me whether it would be useful enough to
you for us to spend the effort to work out details.

Now a comment on color.  There is an undocumented feature in all ViewPlus
printer drivers that permit one to substitute a tactile pattern of your
design for a color.  I intend to write an article for Access2Science
documenting use of this feature - which you can then use with SVG drawings
created with SVG Draw.  

Finally I have a number of suggestions for Dick Baldwin on improvements to
SVG Draw, primarily usability.  Let me be very clear that I think this is a
terrific application, already better than anything ever made for creating
graphics by blind people.  But you asked for suggestions!
* It is too wordy in my opinion.  You have a wonderful help file, and it
really isn't necessary to be told every time that the coordinates are inches
multiplied by 100.  And there are 'ok' boxes that aren't really needed.
When one clicks to get some action that can't be damaging, one doesn't need
to confirm that this is what one really wants.  It's good to have this for
things like "do you really want to exit without saving this file?" etc.
Interesting, one place that such a question is normally asked is when one is
saving over an existing file, and SVG Draw doesn't seem to do that.  But
maybe I just missed it.
*It would be really good if you could use the standard Windows (or Java SWT)
file open and save dialogues.  Anybody sophisticated enough to use SVG Draw
uses these routinely, and it is disconcerting not to have them.
*Several read-only dialog boxes are less accessible then they could be.  I
just reviewed the objects in a drawing.  First of all there seems to be an
id that I didn't put on, and it doesn't help me to identify the object, so I
suggest that it be suppressed, so that only the object type (ie line,
polyline) is shown along with coordinates.  Secondly this dialog is fairly
long, and it cannot be reviewed easily.  One can use the mouse, or review
mode in NVDA, but this is tedious.  It is possible to permit cursor movement
in read-only dialog boxes, at least in standard windows dialogs, because
there are many such.  Can you do this for these logn dialogs?  If so, screen
readers will then be able to review the information letter by letter or word
by word, a great help for me anyhow.

Thanks all.  This is fun!

John Gardner