If you like the ruby on rails concept but you are more familiar with PHP you would do yourself a favor to check out phpCake. It is basically Ruby on Rails using PHP instead of Ruby for its language. I am currently working on a big project using this framework and it has gone fairly smoothly. phpCake IS still fairly immature but already very usable for almost any website. Progress is coming along nicely and it isn't too far from being a very powerful PHP framework.
Also, in reference to the main story, I taught myself how to program in C/C++ beginning at the age of 8 and I think it is probably the best language to learn with. I am surprised that no one else has said this. Why wouldn't you want to first learn the language that is the syntactical template that probably 80%+ of the other languages are based on? Remember that a newb isn't actually making a full featured application he is just playing around with the language. And the fact that it doesn't do much for you automatically means that you end up learning allot more about how the PC is actually working. Things like pointers and memory locations most language try to hide you from which is a good thing when developing real world applications but when you are learning I think it is good to be aware of these things. From my point of view the only real problems with learning in C/C++ is the fact that it takes a few more seconds to compile and sometimes the error messages can be a little cryptic.
If I learned to program using Ruby I really don't think much of the syntax of most other languages would make much sense to me. I base this theory on the fact that when I look at Ruby code it seems very foreign to me even though I'm comfortable in a ton of other languages ranging from VB to PHP to ASM. Maybe it is because I learned in C/C++ that I have trouble reading Ruby code but whatever the reason I find it hard to believe that learning Ruby is going to help a newb as much when they go to learn other language other languages.
Re:When you step back and consider history
on
Beginning Ruby
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· Score: 1
"I am t3h 1337 and neeh 100% control"
hmm, never heard that argument before (maybe I'm too young). How exactly could someone argue that C doesn't allow the control that ASM does when C allows asm code blocks? Did C not always allow asm code blocks?
I'm going to respond to your comment in reverse order because I want to get this out of the way first of all. I am not someone who thinks this technology is useless. I am aware of the fact that most of us (if we live long enough) at some point in our life will have vision impairment to some degree. In fact I'm probably more likely than most to have vision problems at some point in my life since I tend to spend most of my time in front of a monitor. I do think that text-to-speech is not the ideal solution. Although it may be an integral part of an ideal solution, it really falls short when it comes to navigating around your PC and it also sounds nothing like real speech.
As for your use case scenario(s), you say you have many but you keep bringing up the same one. I have already explained to you, as if you didn't already know, that there are very few computers which don't have some form of this tech built into them as part of the OS. To keep things simple lets focus on the Windows text reader (although you may have guessed by my username that I generally wouldn't recommend a GUI interface for someone whom has vision problems, IMO GUIs are crutches for the sighted and just get in the way for those who can't see...but thats a whole different argument). Basically, from what I can tell from reading through your website, the primary advantage of textlets over the Windows text reader is that it is capable of reading in a DOM tree and dissecting it in such a way as to allow you to hover over an element and have that element read to the user out of order. Again this is not new technology but simply re-implementation (or possibly just a mash up) of preexisting (and lacking) technology. That was basically my whole point. I'm not saying this script is entirely useless just that it really isn't anything new and offers, at best, a small advantage over other solutions.
It does however seem to have plenty of weaknesses compared to its competition when you compare it heads up to other applications which need to be installed. I guess from a business point of view the no installation angle is what distinguishes you from them. From my point of view, if someone offers a public accessible computer lab (at least in the US) they are required to provide reasonable access for the handicapped which almost always means that they will set aside one or two PCs which have huge monitors and real Text-to-speech software (you know the kind that can read the menu items too). The same holds true for your work computer.
I will concede that it is possible that you may occasionally need some form of text to speech software and not have access to it when using other peoples PCs. In these cases your software could possibly be more helpful than the Windows service, but even in these cases you are ignoring the other settings a PC will need to accommodate these people. Because even while my friends don't lock their PCs down to the point it is not possible to install software-- apparently yours do. I'm curious, do your friends also lock out the control panel? Because if I can't see the pointer how do I know what I'm pointing at. Not to mention that I will also need the other accessibility features turned on and most of my friend do turn those off first thing when they install a fresh copy of Windows. The facts are that someone who is completely blind has little use for the "point and read" feature of your software and someone who has severe vision problems needs allot more than a Text-to-speech reader to even be able to begin to effectively navigate a GUI environment (meaning that some setup is going to be required either way; so why not install a text-to-speech application while you're at it? [rhet]).
A few side notes:
I did click too fast through the initial page the first time I went to your site. By cleaning my cookies I was able to hear the instructions. Boy am I glad I could "see" your instructions on how to get that working.
Your software appears to work as intended on Linux. Kudos to you for that (eve
I was waiting for someone with more intelligence than I to make a rebuttal to the previous post (I guess they were all to smart too). I suggest that you should have done the same. I disagree with just about everything he said (the only exception being the bit about sending farming supplies to starving countries instead of food (if the land can't be farmed it is not a place people should be living)) but a response like that tends to enforce some of his other points. You could have responded in a hundred intelligent ways but instead you decide to flame his unit. You had a chance to enlighten this guy and others who may think the same way but instead you have only reinforced his way of thinking by responding with a similarly offensive generalization. -1 for humanity; good job.
How is a blind person supposed to be able to use that weblets thing if they can't see the freaking buttons to activate it?
Not to mention that it has all the same flaws as a regular text reader in that it is next to impossible to use on a website made for sighted people. Even your own sales site shows off how crappy it is (e.g. Press the text resize buttons a few times and the whole page goes to shit; or if your mouse moves accidentally the thing starts reading some other part of the page). I realize that currently screen readers are the most used assistive tech for the blind\severely vision impaired to use web pages but this is not new. In fact most operating systems already have support for this sort of technology which makes it hard to define a situation for which this is the superior tool. That is no advance it is simply regurgitated crap.
Speaking of regurgitated crap, the focus of this article is another fine example. Hey guess what we've been hearing about this technology for at least 20 years. It started with VR gaming machines in the early 90s and the challenges haven't changed one bit. Not only is this not portable it is not in the slightest bit practical. Why is it that people keep developing this useless crap. It isn't new tech it is just wasted time trying to re-implement stuff that has already been done for a new purpose. If we can't make it practical for the billions of kids with tons of disposable income there is no way in hell we will be able to for a few blind folks even if the income isn't so disposable. I guess it must be easier to get grant money if the contributors think they are being charitable.
PS: It would be nice if people wouldn't use/. for free ad space like the previous poster has done.
Yes you are both right. I was only trying to point out that if you return 0 then there *must* not have been any problems. It is in reference to the original articles application. The point is that without knowing how detailed the program is and with no specs or source the program can be doing anything. So whatever it has to say is basically meaningless (to the reader at least). It may have been made to accomplish some other task for the authors personally but this is exactly the type of statistical analysis which is totally meaningless to the public without know more about how they came up with the results. Trying to form any kind of opinion about the results of the program based solely on the information in this article is a bad idea. The program may be very detailed and as good of a guess as is possible but hard to say just by what is there.
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If you like the ruby on rails concept but you are more familiar with PHP you would do yourself a favor to check out phpCake. It is basically Ruby on Rails using PHP instead of Ruby for its language. I am currently working on a big project using this framework and it has gone fairly smoothly. phpCake IS still fairly immature but already very usable for almost any website. Progress is coming along nicely and it isn't too far from being a very powerful PHP framework. Also, in reference to the main story, I taught myself how to program in C/C++ beginning at the age of 8 and I think it is probably the best language to learn with. I am surprised that no one else has said this. Why wouldn't you want to first learn the language that is the syntactical template that probably 80%+ of the other languages are based on? Remember that a newb isn't actually making a full featured application he is just playing around with the language. And the fact that it doesn't do much for you automatically means that you end up learning allot more about how the PC is actually working. Things like pointers and memory locations most language try to hide you from which is a good thing when developing real world applications but when you are learning I think it is good to be aware of these things. From my point of view the only real problems with learning in C/C++ is the fact that it takes a few more seconds to compile and sometimes the error messages can be a little cryptic. If I learned to program using Ruby I really don't think much of the syntax of most other languages would make much sense to me. I base this theory on the fact that when I look at Ruby code it seems very foreign to me even though I'm comfortable in a ton of other languages ranging from VB to PHP to ASM. Maybe it is because I learned in C/C++ that I have trouble reading Ruby code but whatever the reason I find it hard to believe that learning Ruby is going to help a newb as much when they go to learn other language other languages.
"I am t3h 1337 and neeh 100% control" hmm, never heard that argument before (maybe I'm too young). How exactly could someone argue that C doesn't allow the control that ASM does when C allows asm code blocks? Did C not always allow asm code blocks?
I think the term you meant to use was oligopoly.
LOL, you must be joking.
I'm going to respond to your comment in reverse order because I want to get this out of the way first of all. I am not someone who thinks this technology is useless. I am aware of the fact that most of us (if we live long enough) at some point in our life will have vision impairment to some degree. In fact I'm probably more likely than most to have vision problems at some point in my life since I tend to spend most of my time in front of a monitor. I do think that text-to-speech is not the ideal solution. Although it may be an integral part of an ideal solution, it really falls short when it comes to navigating around your PC and it also sounds nothing like real speech.
As for your use case scenario(s), you say you have many but you keep bringing up the same one. I have already explained to you, as if you didn't already know, that there are very few computers which don't have some form of this tech built into them as part of the OS. To keep things simple lets focus on the Windows text reader (although you may have guessed by my username that I generally wouldn't recommend a GUI interface for someone whom has vision problems, IMO GUIs are crutches for the sighted and just get in the way for those who can't see...but thats a whole different argument). Basically, from what I can tell from reading through your website, the primary advantage of textlets over the Windows text reader is that it is capable of reading in a DOM tree and dissecting it in such a way as to allow you to hover over an element and have that element read to the user out of order. Again this is not new technology but simply re-implementation (or possibly just a mash up) of preexisting (and lacking) technology. That was basically my whole point. I'm not saying this script is entirely useless just that it really isn't anything new and offers, at best, a small advantage over other solutions.
It does however seem to have plenty of weaknesses compared to its competition when you compare it heads up to other applications which need to be installed. I guess from a business point of view the no installation angle is what distinguishes you from them. From my point of view, if someone offers a public accessible computer lab (at least in the US) they are required to provide reasonable access for the handicapped which almost always means that they will set aside one or two PCs which have huge monitors and real Text-to-speech software (you know the kind that can read the menu items too). The same holds true for your work computer.
I will concede that it is possible that you may occasionally need some form of text to speech software and not have access to it when using other peoples PCs. In these cases your software could possibly be more helpful than the Windows service, but even in these cases you are ignoring the other settings a PC will need to accommodate these people. Because even while my friends don't lock their PCs down to the point it is not possible to install software-- apparently yours do. I'm curious, do your friends also lock out the control panel? Because if I can't see the pointer how do I know what I'm pointing at. Not to mention that I will also need the other accessibility features turned on and most of my friend do turn those off first thing when they install a fresh copy of Windows. The facts are that someone who is completely blind has little use for the "point and read" feature of your software and someone who has severe vision problems needs allot more than a Text-to-speech reader to even be able to begin to effectively navigate a GUI environment (meaning that some setup is going to be required either way; so why not install a text-to-speech application while you're at it? [rhet]).
A few side notes:
I was waiting for someone with more intelligence than I to make a rebuttal to the previous post (I guess they were all to smart too). I suggest that you should have done the same. I disagree with just about everything he said (the only exception being the bit about sending farming supplies to starving countries instead of food (if the land can't be farmed it is not a place people should be living)) but a response like that tends to enforce some of his other points. You could have responded in a hundred intelligent ways but instead you decide to flame his unit. You had a chance to enlighten this guy and others who may think the same way but instead you have only reinforced his way of thinking by responding with a similarly offensive generalization. -1 for humanity; good job.
How is a blind person supposed to be able to use that weblets thing if they can't see the freaking buttons to activate it?
Not to mention that it has all the same flaws as a regular text reader in that it is next to impossible to use on a website made for sighted people. Even your own sales site shows off how crappy it is (e.g. Press the text resize buttons a few times and the whole page goes to shit; or if your mouse moves accidentally the thing starts reading some other part of the page). I realize that currently screen readers are the most used assistive tech for the blind\severely vision impaired to use web pages but this is not new. In fact most operating systems already have support for this sort of technology which makes it hard to define a situation for which this is the superior tool. That is no advance it is simply regurgitated crap.
Speaking of regurgitated crap, the focus of this article is another fine example. Hey guess what we've been hearing about this technology for at least 20 years. It started with VR gaming machines in the early 90s and the challenges haven't changed one bit. Not only is this not portable it is not in the slightest bit practical. Why is it that people keep developing this useless crap. It isn't new tech it is just wasted time trying to re-implement stuff that has already been done for a new purpose. If we can't make it practical for the billions of kids with tons of disposable income there is no way in hell we will be able to for a few blind folks even if the income isn't so disposable. I guess it must be easier to get grant money if the contributors think they are being charitable.
PS: It would be nice if people wouldn't use /. for free ad space like the previous poster has done.
Yes you are both right. I was only trying to point out that if you return 0 then there *must* not have been any problems. It is in reference to the original articles application. The point is that without knowing how detailed the program is and with no specs or source the program can be doing anything. So whatever it has to say is basically meaningless (to the reader at least). It may have been made to accomplish some other task for the authors personally but this is exactly the type of statistical analysis which is totally meaningless to the public without know more about how they came up with the results. Trying to form any kind of opinion about the results of the program based solely on the information in this article is a bad idea. The program may be very detailed and as good of a guess as is possible but hard to say just by what is there.