Sri Jayawardhanapura- Initialization Test

An initialization evaluation session was held at University of Sri Jayawardhanapura today. The test subject is the Head of blind computing at the university: Mr. Chanka. Mr Chanka is an experienced, advanced computer user mainly working with JAWS. We were enlightened on few other open-source alternatives to JAWS which he suggested, we should try and integrate our system/concept into. The testing program started at around 2 PM, after lunch and was held for about an hour.

The evaluation process was more controlled and well defined than the other sessions. The subject was assisted during the registration process, in which he would familiarize with the text box management. After registering the subject was asked to login to the system using the predefined, username and password. The reason for the predefined login was that it had all the necessary relationships already defined (eg. The new user has no friends or messages. ).
The user was guided to search a friend using the term 'ni' and see the results, then select the first name (there was only one suggestion) and view the friends profile. The profile holds a table, something they do not experience JAWS, the table had the terms Name,Contact Number, Address etc and the respective values in the right column. The structure was correctly identified and was explained to us as a table (surprisingly the word table was used by the subject, which was more than we expected. :)). Then the table structures and how they are built in HTML was discussed with the subject (subject initiated by the user). Mr. Chanaka is a PHP developer. The tables are identified by the blind using the arrow keys in a word document, but it is impossible to actually experience in an web page as the subject explained.
Then the discussion was held to identify the observations by the user on the grid. The grid held name,address,contact number and user-name as the column headings, which were read prior to the data. Then the respective data were read according to the grid. The subject correctly identified the layout. He explained that the column names were in the top and the date is spread in respect to the column names. The explanation was initiated by the user, without any indication about the column names and data from us.
As suggestions the user said that identifying the location is important in teaching process. Expecailly if teaching to a non blind student. (The example he used is, if he could askthe student to find gmail registration link in top left corner, in the page, they would actually look, and the explanation would be complete ).
Mr. Chanka expressed his idea about using the concept on MS word 2007, which has the ribbon at the top of the page as a strip. He said that if the placement of the ribbon was known by the blind user it would increase the experience to a maximum level.
Finally he said that this is a very important feature that must be included in JAWS.
We came into believing that qualitative data may be more relevant to our project than qualitative data.