EdSharp 2.1 released

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http://www.EmpowermentZone.com/edsetup.exe

Version 2.1
Released September 1, 2007

This version primarily seeks to implement some ideas I gathered about
writing HTML. The new pasting capability is tailored for either HTML or
text — the latter snippet type being applicapable to templates and prose
generally. HTML support already included checking syntax with the Tidy
utility, as well as converting between Markdown and HTML. Fixes and
improvements are documented below.

Jamal

Fixed Section Break (Control+Enter) and Replace (Control+R) commands not
handling tokens correctly.

Improved compatibility with Dragon voice dictation software. Made EdSharp
change the current directory to that of a file opened by the user.

The Open Previous setting determines whether files open at the end of the
previous EdSharp session are automatically opened at the start of the next
one. The default is No in this version, but it was Yes in version 2.0 when
this setting was reserved but not actually implemented. Since upgrading
EdSharp generally does not replace installed settings, your setting may be
Yes inadvertently. If you would prefer that EdSharp not open files
automatically in this way, you can press Alt+Shift+C for
Configuration Options, then Alt+O for the OpenPrevious edit box and N for
its value. Alternatively, create a fresh configuration file by pressing
Alt+Shift+M for Manual Options, Alt+Shift+D to delete the EdSharp.ini file,
Y to confirm, and Alt+F4 to close EdSharp. The next time you load EdSharp a
custom configuration file will be created with default values.

This version increases word processing functionality by adding bullet
justification in addition to left, center, or right (Alt+Shift+J).
Superscript and subscript support is also added. Press Alt+Shift+6 (think
of a caret symbol) to change the virtical alignment of text. Press
Control+6 to go to the next change in baseline, or Control+Shift+6 for the
previous one. The Query Styles command (Alt+Slash) says current styles
(bold, italic and/or underline), as well as justification and baseline
alignment.

The Web Download command, Alt+Shift+W, lets you pick one or more files to
download from a page whose address you specify. If Internet Explorer is
open, EdSharp uses the value in its address bar as the default. Each item
of the resulting checked listbox shows both the clickable text of the url
and its target file name. Press Spacebar to toggle the checked state of
an item. After picking files, you are prompted for the target folder on
disk. If a file with the same name already exists, a unique name is created
by adding a numeric suffix, e.g., page_01.htm, page_02.htm, etc.

A listbox control of the .NET Framework does not support multiple letter
navigation, so each letter typed jumps to the next item starting with that
letter. To make navigation more flexible and efficient, particularly in a
listbox with many items, EdSharp adds the following features to a list based
dialog. Control+J prompts for text within an item, going to the first match
if a new search, or the next match if the previous value is accepted. Alt+J
goes to the next match without prompting for a value. In a checked listbox,
such as the Web Download dialog, Control+A checks all items, Control+Shift+A
unchecks them, and Shift+Space reads which are checked. The item with focus
when the dialog is closed (but not canceled) becomes the current item the
next time that the same list dialog is invoked. The Jump value of that
dialog is also remembered.

New commands support development of web pages. Press Control+Shift+Period
(think of the > symbol) to go to the closing tag of an HTML element, or
Control+Shift+Comma for the opening one. A documentation section
describes the snippet capability as follows.

Pasting Snippets Press Alt+S to save all or selected text to a file that may
be conveniently pasted into other documents. You may give the file any
name, except that it should have a .txt extension. It is saved in a
subfolder
of the EdSharp data folder. Each programming compiler or interpreter may
have its own set of snippets. The subfolder name is the same as the current
value of the Pick Compiler command, Control+Shift+F5. If no compiler has
been chosen, the name "Default" is used. Press Alt+V to pick one of the
available snippets and paste it into the current document. You can manage
snippet files with the View Snippet Folder command, Alt+Shift+V, which opens
Windows Explorer in the subfolder containing snippet files.

A snippet may be either literal or an interpreted type. A literal snippet
is pasted completely. An interpreted type is seperated into an initial
header line and remaining lines as its body. The header line contains
keywords, in lower case, that control how EdSharp processes the snippet. At
present, two interpreted types are defined: html and text. The type
keyword must be the first word on the header line, and thus the first word
of the snippet file.

The first body line of an HTML snippet is the name of an HTML tag.
Subsequent body lines are attributes of the tag. An optional default value
can follow the attribute name, seperated by an equals sign (=).
Here is an example for the anchor tag:

html phrase
a
href=
name=
target=
class=
title=
src=

The "phrase" keyword tells EdSharp that the tag may be embedded in a
paragraph, rather than creating a block with line breaks before and after.
Another keyword, "empty," would tell EdSharp not to add a closing tag like
</a> when pasting (e.g., for the <br> tag).

EdSharp pastes only those attributes that have values greater then zero in
length as part of the opening tag. To include an attribute with essentially
no value, enter a space character for it in the dialog. If text is selected
when pressing Alt+V, it is surrounded by the opening and closing tags, and
the cursor is placed afterward. If there is no selection, the cursor is
placed between the opening and closing tags.

Over 100 HTML snippets are distributed with EdSharp, including common
attributes used by the tags. Snippet files may be modified or added.
Upgrading EdSharp does not overwrite snippet files with the same names.

With the text type of snippet, EdSharp pastes the whole body after making
possible substitutions controlled by a keyword called "form." This lets you
embed variables or constants in the body. A variable has surrounding
percent signs and an equals sign between the name and default value. For
example, the variable %City=%Silver Spring% means a variable named City with
a default value of Silver Spring. EdSharp creates a dialog that prompts for
the value of each variable it finds in the snippet body. It then replaces
the variable references with the values entered.

Certain constants are also defined: %Date% for the current date, %Time% for
the time, %UserName% for the Windows user name, %UserFirstName% for the
first part of that name, and %UserLastName% for the second part, if any.
Date and Time formats may be customized as EdSharp configuration options,
using the DateTime formatting syntax of the .NET Framework, explained at

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.datetimeformatinfo(VS.80).aspx
If a snippet header contains the "caret" keyword, EdSharp looks for a double
caret sequence (^^) in the body, and positions the cursor (think of blinking
caret) in that location after pasting. An example text type snippet is
called Letter.txt, located in the Default snippet folder. Its content is as
follows:

text form caret
%Date%

Dear %Customer=%:

Thank you for your purchase of %Product=Super Widget%. ^^

Sincerely,
%UserName%

EdSharp notices that this is a text type snippet because of the first word
of the file. It finds two other keywords on the header line: form and
caret. It creates a dialog with two edit boxes, prompting for the Customer
and Product — defaulting to Super Widget. It substitutes the values
entered, as well as date and user name constants. After pasting, the cursor
is positioned after the first sentence.

Visual Verification: Study Seeks to Expand the Usefulness of Audio CAPTCHA

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Andy Schlaikjer, a Ph.D student at Carnegie Mellon University, has asked us to carry the following announcement:

I’m conducting a study to aid my research and development of a new form of audio CAPTCHA. If you’d like to participate, please visit the Audio reCAPTCHA study web site.

A CAPTCHA is a special kind of test which can be used to tell humans and computers apart. Many web sites use CAPTCHA’s to combat fraud and automated access to their services. Unfortunately, most CAPTCHA’s are based on a visual task, such as recognizing distorted letters in an image. Such a task can be quite difficult, or impossible, for visually impaired human users to perform.

In an attempt to alleviate this accessibility concern, audio-based CAPTCHA’s have been developed which require users to listen to and transcribe a short audio clip containing a series of random spoken digits. However, performance of state-of-the-art Automatic Speech Recognition technology suggests that this approach may not represent a very strong CAPTCHA in practice. Additionally, the data collected from such a test may only be used to determine the authenticity of the user, and is normally discarded once the test has been performed.

The goals of my research are (1) to develop a stronger form of audio CAPTCHA, (2) create a CAPTCHA which collects useful data, and (3) to strengthen support and adoption of audio-based CAPTCHA’s on the Web. To these ends, I am developing a new audio CAPTCHA based on a more complex task: Transcription of arbitrary speech. For more information, please contact me, or visit the study web site at the URL mentioned above.

Cheers,
Andy Schlaikjer

While we appreciate the new found consideration of accessibility by the people at Carnegie Mellon University, with respect to CAPTCHA, and recognize that audio CAPTCHA is the current state of the art, the considerable ongoing research in this area ought to bring all of us to one concern, which we must ultimately address. Audio CAPTCHA, like its visual cousin, inherently denies access to the deaf and hearing impaired population. This means that the presentation of both an audio and visual CAPTCHA continues to lock out those people whom happen to be both blind and deaf. It seems to us that greater focus ought to be placed, instead, on the development of a highly secure, non-sensory challenge response system that does not inherently discriminate against any legitimate human being, regardless of disability.

Since the reCAPTCHA team has taken considerable steps to improve the accessibility and usability of their current audio CAPTCHA scheme, let’s all help Andy with his study. At the same time, let us all remind CMU and others that, in the long run, audio and visual CAPTCHA does not afford equal access and full participation to all human beings. Instead, it is absolutely critical that a better method of authentication and authorization be devised.

Visual Verification: Please Help Test ReCAPTCHA Audio Playback

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We have received a request from one of the ReCAPTCHA programmers to perform some testing in an attempt to improve the usability of their audio playback alternative. Once again, this is our opportunity to provide feedback that can result in a direct increase in the accessibility of CAPTCHA. Let’s all step up to the plate this time!

Please complete the following steps, noting the answers to all questions presented:

  1. Note the operating system, name and version of the web browser and screen reader being run for this test.

  2. Visit the ReCAPTCHA live demonstration page.

  3. Select the audio challenge link.

  4. Did you hear any audio?

  5. Were you able to solve the audio CAPTCHA successfully?

  6. If not, what happened? Please note any error messages.

  7. Choose the “Can’t hear the sound?” link.

  8. Were you able to download the MP3 file? If not, please note any error message shown.

  9. Visit Twitter’s Create an Account page.

  10. Select the audio challenge link.

  11. Did you hear any audio?

  12. Were you able to solve the audio CAPTCHA successfully?

  13. If not, what happened? Please note any error messages.

  14. Choose the “Can’t hear the sound?” link.

  15. Were you able to download the MP3 file? If not, please note any error message shown.

  16. Optionally, please note your IP address.

  17. Send your test results to support@recaptcha.net and post a copy as a comment to this article.

The ReCAPTCHA people really want to make sure their service works for as many users as possible, so let’s all step up to the challenge and get them as many high quality test results as possible.

Visual Verification: Trouble with Audio CAPTCHA on Twitter

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We have received numerous reports from blind users who are unable to use Twitter’s audio CAPTCHA for the past several days. We ask as many of you as possible to visit Twitter, try the audio CAPTCHA and report your results in this ticket opened with Twitter’s customer support team. If you’re already signed into Twitter, it will be necessary to sign out in order to try the audio CAPTCHA again.

Urgent: Bloglines May Soon Become Inaccessible!

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The Bloglines people have just come out with their beta representing the future of the service. As it stands, things don’t look very good for us blind folks with respect to its continued accessibility. Once we lose Bloglines, there will be no accessible, web based RSS feed aggregator for blind people! Let’s all urgently provide our feedback to the Bloglines team reminding them of our existence and asking them to keep accessibility in mind.

TV Guide Wireless – At Last, Accessible Online TV Listings!

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If you have been looking for easy to use, fully accessible online television listings, your search is over! The TV Guide Wireless service for mobile PDA and smart phone users is just the ticket. Simply select the TV Listings link, enter your zip code and select your provider to find out what’s on TV right now. The listings are provided in a simple text format showing the channel number, channel name and title of the currently playing program. If you want to know what’s on for a different date or hour, accomplishing that is straightforward as well. This service comes highly recommended for both its usability and full accessibility to blind and visually impaired computer users. If you agree that this is the most accessible resource for TV listings, please consider submitting your feedback to TV Guide. Let’s make sure the company is made aware we are using this site, in hopes that it remains both accessible and available to us in the future.

EdSharp 2.0 released

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http://www.EmpowermentZone.com/edsetup.exe

Version 2.0
Released August 25, 2007

Major programming and word processing enhancements have raised the version
from 1.2 to 2.0. EdSharp is now a text editor, file converter, coding
environment, and mini word processor! Fixes and improvements are documented
below.

Jamal

Fixed the Jump command not recognizing a column as well as line number.
Fixed regular expression dialogs requiring a double rather than single
backslash to begin a special token.
Fixed the Yield with Regular Expression command (Control+Shift+Y) not
remembering the previous expression used.
Fixed Exporting from HTML to Markdown.

Extra speech messages may now be toggled off — or reactivated — with
Control+Shift+X. When off, such messages are redirected to a text file
called Speech.log, which may be examined in an editing window with
Alt+Shift+X. This file is initialized when EdSharp starts, and the Extra
Speech setting is remembered from the previous session.

Made Delete Right (Control+Shift+Delete) and Delete Line (Alt+Backspace)
delete to the end of the visible line — wrapping is respected. The new
Delete Hard Line command (Control+D) deletes through any wrapping until just
past the next hard line break (what is created by pressing Enter).
The Delete Paragraph command (Control+Shift+D) deletes from the current line
through the next one or more blank lines.

Press Alt+F7 to look up definitions of a word from the dictionary.com web
site. EdSharp prompts for a word or phrase, defaulting to the current chunk
or selected text. The definitions retrieved are placed in a new editing
window.

When a file is saved without giving it an extension, .rtf is added as a
configurable default. If a file would be overwritten, the original may be
optionally saved with .bak added (default is No).
Each option in the Configuration dialog (Alt+Shift+C) has a unique access
key in its label, so you can jump directly to it with an Alt plus letter
combination. Some options are reserved but not yet implemented.

Sections added to the EdSharp documentation discuss the new word processing
and programming features as follows:

Word Processing
EdSharp supports several aspects of Rich Text Format (.rtf) as well as plain
text (with optional structure). In certain situations, EdSharp behaves
differently if a file has a .rtf extension rather than any other one.
Specifically, the Open Other Format command, Control+Shift+O, imports a .rtf
file with its formatting rather than converting it to plain text. The Save,
Save As, and Save Copy commands, Control+S, Control+Shift+S, and Alt+S, save
a .rtf file with formatting preserved.
Use the Copy Rich Text command, Control+Shift+C, to copy selected text with
formatting to the clipboard.

Formatting commands include the following. Use the Justify command,
Alt+Shift+J, to set the horizontal alignment of text as left, center, or
right. This formatting applies to either selected text or the current hard
line — a line of text terminated by a hard line break (created by pressing
Enter rather than wrapping).

Use the Style command, Alt+Slash, to set or clear bold, italic, or underline
formatting. This applies to either selected text or text ahead of the
current cursor position. Similarly, the Set Selection Font command,
Alt+Shift+Dash, adjusts the font or color of selected text or text ahead of
the cursor (think of a "dashing" display). The key to its right,
Alt+Shift+Equals, is for setting the default font of a new document. The
Justify, Style, and Font dialogs indicate current format settings.

Navigation commands let you move forward or backward to a change in
formatting. Control+RightBracket goes to the next justification change, and
Control+LeftBracket goes to the previous one. Control+Slash goes to the
next style change, and Control+Shift+Slash goes to the previous one.
Control+Dash goes to the next font change and Control+Shift+Dash goes to the
previous one. The cursor stops at the character with different formatting.
The new formatting is announced and current line is read.

To query the current font and color, press Alt+Dash. For justification and
styles, press Alt+Slash.

Programming
Press Tab to indent the current line of text, or Shift+Tab to outdent it.
If multiple lines of text are selected, these commands are applied to all of
them. Press Alt+I to hear the number of indentation levels of the current
line. The Trim Blanks command, Control+Shift+Enter, removes all indentation
and trailing spaces at once, as well as removing more than two consecutive
blank lines (when multiple lines are selected).

Press Alt+Shift+I to toggle a mode in which you are alerted to changes in
indentation level, such as when using the up and down arrow keys. EdSharp
will say how many levels in or out the indentation has changed. This mode
also reverses the rols of the Enter and Shift+Enter keys.

When Indent Mode is off, you can start a new line of text with the same
indentation as the current one by pressing Shift+Enter. By default, an
indentation unit is two spaces. This may be changed with the Configuration
Options command, Alt+Shift+C (or use Alt+Shift+M to manually edit settings
in the EdSharp.ini file). To go to the first character of the current line
after any indentation, press Alt+Home. To go to the last non-white space
character, press Alt+End.

Press Control+I to go to the next code block, or Control+Shift+I to go to
the previous one. EdSharp considers a line of text with less indentation to
be part of a different code block. For example, if the cursor is inside a
loop block, then Control+I will go to the line at the closing of the loop
where a lower level of indentation resumes. In Ruby, this would be the line
with the word "end" or a right brace (}) character. In Python, it would be
the first line of code following the loop, since the change in indentation,
itself, indicates the end of the loop.

The Quote and Unquote commands, Control+Q and Control+Shift+Q, may be used
to add or remove comment symbols at the start of lines. The default quote
prefix may be changed from > to a comment sequence appropriate for the
language in use, e.g., ' for Visual Basic, * for Xbase, ; for AutoIt, or #
for Ruby.

Curly brace characters delimit code structures in a number of languages.
Press Control+B to find the matching right brace (}) character from the
current location. Press Control+Shift+B for the matching left brace ({)
instead. Press Alt+B to hear the number of unmatched left braces before the
cursor and right braces after. Different brace characters may be
configured, e.g., angle brackets (<>) for editing HTML or XML. If the
cursor is on a brace-type character when issuing one of these commands,
i.e., one of {}<>[]() , then EdSharp uses that character and its opposite
when searching, regardless of the current setting.

A scripting language allows a program to be run as a text file associated by
extension with its interpreter, e.g., .pl for Perl, .au3 for AutoIt, and
.rbw for Ruby files. Press F5 to run the current file with its associated
interpreter. If the current file name has a complete path, EdSharp saves to
disk before running the file to ensure the latest version is being used.
Otherwise, EdSharp saves to a file in a temporary folder and runs that file.

The Alt+F5 command prompts for a command to run and speaks its standard
output. The path of the current file may be passed via the syntax described
for EdSharp's Import and Export capability. The command remembers its
previous value, and may be adjusted each time it is run.
Use the Review Output command, Alt+Shift+F5, to open a new editing window
containing the output produced by the last command.

Use the Compile command, Control+F5, for a programming language that
involves compiling source code to binary form. For example, a C# program in
a .cs file may be compiled to a .exe file. This command may also be used
for interpreters that report syntax errors via the standard output or
standard error streams.

These tool commands typically begin with the file name of the compiler or
interpreter. Any parameters may be specified thereafter. If the token
%SourceDir% is included, EdSharp temporarily changes to the directory
containing the source file before running the tool.

The first line and column position mentioned in the output, if any, is
assumed to be the position of a compilation error in the source code.
EdSharp uses the JumpPosition setting to find the position in the output
based on a regular expression. The regular expression should be defined so
that the first number of a matching string is the line number and the second
number, if any, is the column number. EdSharp automatically jumps to that
position. It is also saved so that the Jump Again command, Alt+J, returns
there.

Another regular expression may be configured for navigating among routines
in source code. The NavigatePart setting is used by Alt+PageDown and
Alt+PageUp to go to the next or previous function, method, or class
definition.

Thus, the Compile command, Control+F5, combines debugging steps efficiently
by compiling, saying output without a model message box, and automatically
jumping to the first error position, if found in the output. The output
spoken may be abbreviated by means of a regular expression setting that
specifies the pattern of text to remove. The Pick Compiler command,
Control+Shift+F5, lets you conveniently configure the CompileCommand ,
AbbreviateOutput, JumpPosition, NavigatePart, and QuotePrefix ssettings for
a particular compiler or interpreter. EdSharp offers settings for the
following languages: C#, HTML, Java, JAWS Script, Perl, PHP, PowerBASIC,
PowerShell, Python, Ruby, and Visual Basic .NET.

The name of a tool to be run should either include its directory location or
be available on the Windows search path. This may be adjusted by editing
the Path environment variable in the Advanced tab page of the System applet
in Control Panel. If the tool is a long file name enclosed in quotes then
either prefix the command line with the @ symbol or enclose the whole thing
in quotes. This is necessary to prevent .ini file manipulation functions of
Windows from losing the opening quote before the tool.

For HTML, the HTML Tidy utility is configured by default and distributed
with EdSharp. After eliminating coding errors found with Control+F5, use
Alt+Shift+E to export to a target file containing clean HTML. More
information is available at http://tidy.sourceforge.net

For PowerBASIC, a batch file is needed (in the EdSharp program folder),
which refers to the default location of PowerBasic for Windows version 8.0.
The path to the JAWS script compiler is also hard coded for the latest
version. JAWS scripting is additionally supported by EdSharp's own scripts:
Control+I is a hot key for inserting the path to the user script folder, and
Control+Shift+I is for the All Users script folder, when focus
is in the Open or Save Dialog of EdSharp.

Compiler settings are stored in the [Compilers] section of the EdSharp.ini
file. Only current compiler settings appear in the configuration options
dialog, Alt+Shift+C. Other settings may be edited, however, using the
Manual Options command, Alt+Shift+M. You can adjust command line
parameters of configured compilers, or add others. Installing a new version
of EdSharp does not change existing compiler settings.