nvda@nvda.groups.io

Re: OT: selecting a new laptop is more difficult than before

Gene

#30817

I don't have the technical knowledge to answer your question. If this isn't useful to you, it may be to others. Have you tried using sites with scripting turned off? If you don't need it on to do what you want to do on a site, the site may be faster and more responsive. Also, what browser are you using? Some people say one or another browser is faster. I'm not sure that is correct or, if it is for some people, I'm not at all sure it is for all users. But those are things you might want to experiment with.

Gene

Show quoted text

----- Original Message -----

From: Deborah Armstrong

Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2017 10:26 AM

To: nvda@nvda.groups.io

Subject: [nvda] OT: selecting a new laptop is more difficult than before

** This was also cross-posted to Cavi-discuss ***

As a screen reader user, I'm finding selecting a new laptop is more difficult than ever before. I'm very curious to see what others think, so please post your thoughts.

It used to be that I didn't feel I needed a super fast computer, because I wasn't editing video. And nowadays if you look at reviews of laptops, you'll see that people who edit photos, use CAD systems, create art or engage in heavy gaming need fast machines. But for those who just surf the web, read email and do some light word processing, reviewers maintain that a slower and cheaper laptop will work just fine. In fact, reviews of chromebooks are often mixed in with reviews of inexpensive Windows laptops for just that reason.

In 2012 my Acer netbook (An AO-756) was the fastest ultraportable I could buy for under $500. Its processor, a 1.4GHZ Intel Celeron 877 was a dual core from the Sandy Bridge family -- the slowest one in that family, but it wasn't a much slower Atom. It had a reasonable fast 500GB hard drive. I added 8GB of RAM making it even more useful at running multiple tasks efficiently. I could use Word, Excel and Outlook without latency and of course I did a lot of web surfing. Compared to the computers at work, it was a bit slower, but like the reviewers said, it didn't matter, since I didn't do computation-heavy tasks at home.

What's changed today might best be covered in this post:

https://www.marcozehe.de/2017/09/29/rethinking-web-accessibility-on-windows/

which discusses how screen readers access the web. Today, if I have to work with a dynamic website, my little ACER is unbearably slow, despite my having carefully maintained it so it doesn't run unnecessary background tasks, and so that Windows is regularly fully refreshed.

I am convinced the problem is not so much that the PC is slow, but that the screen reader has become a palace built on a shack's foundation. It needs everything it can squeeze out of the processor to handle the new, dynamic web. Seems both NVDA and JAWS fail miserably on slower processors.

But if a task does not depend on a screen reader, the machine is still fairly fast. For example, when I OCR something in Kurzweil 1000, the laptop is just as fast as my much more powerful desktop computers at work. And running something like Handbrake is indeed slower on my laptop but not so slow it cannot be used. A video that takes an hour to convert on my desktop at work might take fifteen extra minutes on the laptop. Handbrake is often used as an informal benchmarking tool.

But where instant responsiveness counts, my Netbook falls short. I expect to hear something when I press a key. Often, today, I don't -- seems like I am always waiting for the screen reader to pull itself together and find the focus, or cope with a dynamic partial page refresh, or the next column in the spreadsheet, or read my next email in Thunderbird.

The Acer actually got fractionally faster when I upgraded to Windows 10, but even so, I mostly wait after pressing a key to hear something read back to me.

My work computers which run Core i7 Pentiums respond immediately, even though they are saddled with far more background tasks required by my job.

So if I were to trust reviews, this claim that for the kinds of things I do at home on the laptop I don't need a very powerful machine, I'd buy something with an Atom processor, a 128GB SSD and 2GB of RAM. Clearly that would result in a machine that's even slower than my existing laptop. Plus, it would have a quarter of the storage!

I guess the dilemma I'm struggling with here is how to avoid spending a fortune and still get an ultraportable that has no latency when I use a screen reader.

What do others think?

--Debee

Re: How to access Firefox notifications with NVDA

Gene

#30816

Do you mean stop redirection notices? Alt a is announced as the allow command at the end of the announcement. If you want to turn off the notification completely, I'll write instructions in another message.

To tell Firefox not to offer to remember passwords, do the following.

New main steps start on new lines:

Alt t then o to open options.

After waiting a moment, tab once. You are now in a list of categories.

Start down arrowing until you get to security.

If down arrowing stops moving you before you get there, up arrow once then continue down arrowing.

Once you get to security, start tabbing until you get to a checkbox that says something like remember logins. Uncheck it with the space bar. You won't be asked any longer.

There is no ok button in this dialog-like structure. Settings take immediate effect. This is a web page in the browser and since you are on a web page that mimics a dialog, do whatever you want to do that you would do while on a web page after you change the setting. That is, go to another page by using a book mark, close the browser, etc.

Show quoted text

Gene

----- Original Message -----

From: Mary Otten

Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2017 9:59 AM

To: nvda@nvda.groups.io

Subject: [nvda] How to access Firefox notifications with NVDA

I am using the extended service release of Firefox on windows 10 machine with the stable release of NVDA. Sometimes Firefox will put up notices, such as when it offers to remember passwords or when it informs you that has blocked a redirection from the site. How can I access these in order to either tell it I don’t want it to save a password or that I do wanted to allow a redirection?
Mary

Sent from my iPhone

OT: selecting a new laptop is more difficult than before

Deborah Armstrong <debee@...>

#30815