Re: Workrave and XP magnifier.

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Ray Satiro wrote:

> Hello Hugh,
> 
> After re-reading your e-mail and testing the magnifier, I think
> it's unlikely we will be incorporating an enhancement to make
> Workrave more accessible when using that tool.

Why is that?

> 
> I'm looking into a solution for the issue where Workrave break
> windows are not controllable via keyboard.

OK.  Is it possible to avoid grabbing focus from another app, or to
give it back to that app pretty much immediately?  That would allow
me to click on the window to access its controls if I need to, but
not otherwise.  This is provided that the window doesn't run away
from the mouse.

> 
> As Kees-Jan suggested in an earlier e-mail this afternoon, you can
> suspend Workrave on the computer you support by right-clicking its
> icon and choosing Mode > Suspended. The owner can later enable
> Workrave by changing the mode from 'Suspended' to 'Normal'.

Yes, and that is all very well, but I couldn't see the icon, didn't
know what to look for, and could see no information about what the
package was called.  All I could see was windows popping up about
micro-breaks, and there is no application called micro-breaks on the
system.

I think the following things would help considerably:

1 Make the name of the tool more prominent in the interface, allowing
  one to find its files in C:\Program Files, and so on;.

2 Provide a help button, which displays the contents of the README,
  but with a little text saying what the application is for, and
  telling people to look at the system tray for the sheep icon.
  Pointing to the web is not enough, something Microsoft need to 
  learn about for their documentation: there are plenty of reasons
  why the internet may not be reachable;

3 Provide some means which is also prominent of stopping the
  application, still allowing it to restart at next login, or
  whatever.  I'm thinking of a stop button in the popup windows,
  possibly with an "are you sure?" dialogue warning about the
  risks of RSI, etc;

4 Allow the resizing of the dialogue with the times in it.  I'd
  argue that all windows should be resizable because (for example
  in safe mode) sometimes the resolution of the display is very low,
  and windows won't fit on the screen.  I have had this with
  system windows which I could not close because the only close
  or OK buttons were off the bottom of the screen when the window
  was pushed up against the top.

Its present behaviour, with popups and the difficulty of killing it
unless you know where to look, gave the same impression as a piece
of malware.  Clearly it does need to interrupt the person who is
working to the extent that they notice it and respond by having a
break.  If it takes control of the system, regardless of the
needs of the user, then in my opinion, this violates the whole
principle that the computer is supposed to be the servant of the
user, not the master.  If the user is medically, or legally, obliged
to obey the software, that is surely a matter for the human, not
the machine?  At present it is interfering with other users
providing support to the principal user of the machine.

I suggest that you think about the issuse in this Scientific American
article on Considerate Computing.

http://interruptions.net/literature/Gibbs-SA05-0105054.pdf

On the machine I was using, its principal user didn't expect the
software to be there either, and didn't know how to get rid of 
the interruptions.

> 
> To Hugh and the rest of the mailing list,
> Workrave uses a graphical user interface (GTK+) which is DPI
> aware, however Workrave itself may not be fully taking advantage
> of this (in Windows). For example, if you have a
> higher-than-normal font DPI (eg 120) Workrave should scale its
> windows. I haven't tested this recently. I had mixed results in
> Windows Server 2003 and XP some time ago. If there is any
> improvement in scaling forthcoming on Windows it will probably be
> better DPI awareness, and it will probably be due to improvements
> in GTK+ rather than Workrave itself.

I'd submit that this needs to be looked at with some priority
because as far as I have been able to determine, you can change
the font size for the desktop icons, and window title bars, but
anything else in windows must be changed by changing the screen
resolution.  

[The fact that I think way to enlarge things is wrong, that most of
the time I need large print, but occasionally would like to see
detail with some magnifier, is irrelevant: Microsoft won't be doing
anything based on my opinion.]


> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Ray

Thank you,
        Hugh
> 
> --- On Wed, 10/21/09, Hugh Sasse <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> From: Hugh Sasse <hgs[AT}dmu.ac.uk>
> Subject: [Workrave-user] Workrave and XP magnifier.
> To: Workrave-user[AT]lists.sourceforge.net
> Date: Wednesday, October 21, 2009, 5:53 AM
> 
> Workrave has been imaged onto a machine I support.  I have to use
> the Windows magnifier (which you can bring up with <Windows-R> then
> type magnify<return>, when it comes up press return to get rid of
> the message about access software, <up-arrow> a few times to
> increase the magnification to about 6, then <return> to minimize the
> magnifier options window) in order to work with that display.
> 
> When Workrave brings up the pre-break warning dialogue, it appears
> over the magnifier window, and it is thus not magnified.  Trying to
> move the mouse over the window in order to see its contents results
> in the window moving to the bottom of the screen.  Moving the mouse
> to the window's new position results on it moving back to the top of
> the screen.  How is one supposed to see the contents of this window
> when using the magnifier?
> 
> When the break dialogue comes up, there are no keyboard shortcuts
> for it.  There is also no help facility in it to find out what it
> will do once the progress bar reaches the end.  So far I have
> managed to skip or postpone the thing before that happens.  Given
> that I can't see the mouse pointer on the screen without the
> magnification, it is extremely difficult to navigate to wherever
> this window comes up at short notice.
> 
> I later noticed a really small window on the desktop, with a coffee
> cup icon and a time (3:50 I think) in an entry box next to it, and a
> couple of similar boxes below.  I think this is part of the same
> program.  It is not possible to resize this window in order to see
> the program name properly on the title bar, but it does begin with
> "Wo".  It is not possible to see from the exposed part of the window
> whether the times are hours:minutes, or minutes:seconds.  There seem
> to be no tooltips to say what the icons are for, and no help facility.
> 
> Someone pointed out a very small sheep icon on the taskbar, but the
> tooltips for that don't mention the program name, only talking about
> micro-breaks.
> 
> Only by searching for micro-breaks using Google did I find out what
> this program might be, and thus find that workrave is installed on
> here.
> 
> Is anyone able to reproduce this behaviour?
> Are there any configuration files/tools to make this program more
> accessible?
> 
>         Thank you,
>         Hugh
> 
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