Dear list members,

Below is a message I sended to Steve Palmer (president of Dolphin) and Mike
Hill (Dolphin beta co-ordinator) some weeks ago.
Dolphin didn't reply to this message. So now is the time to publish this
message and share it with you.
Dolphin seems not to accept any criticism on their products and tries to
manipulate reviews in magazines as they did in the Netherlands.
Their new strategy seems to be boycotting The Screen Magnifiers Homepage at
http://www.magnifiers.org.
For The Screen Magnifiers Homepage it is difficult to work with this kind
of companies. Companies that does not respond to questions about their
products.

In the message below you can read how I'm thinking about Supernova. What in
my opinion the strong points and the weak points are of the Dolphin products.
Dolphin does not accept that I'm saying such things.
We as visual impaired must close our mouth and thank god that they make
these products for us.
This is how a lot of visual impaired behave, but this is not the way we get
better products.
If you do not agree with Dolphin you can send your protest to
[log in to unmask], or simply not purchase products from them.

Regards Peter Verhoeven
Internet : http://www.magnifiers.org (The Screen Magnifiers Homepage)


MESSAGE TO DOLPHIN
Hi Steve,

Now Supernova 5 is released I like to give you some feedback and more
clearness in the  position of The Screen Magnifiers Homepage.

1. SUPERNOVA BETA TESTING

After I was excluded from the Supernova Beta test I received messages from
9 other beta testers who didn't agree with excluding me.
On the orther side I'm not sure if Supernova had the same quality if I and
some others didn't give our critical notes they way we did. I and some
others had the feeling, that at beta 9 Dolphin did not listen.

For example I made many comments on the bad performing of Supernova. I was
very surprised after installing beta 12, because the performance was
excelent there. In my opinion a lot of problems on the beta list should be
prevent by more communication. A simple message to the list "we are working
on improving performance" had stopped the discussion.

I also know, that sometimes I am a very exacting person. But I do not like
to mention it a hijacker as Dolphin did.
For me it is always difficult to concentrate on small bugs in a beta
product if in my opinion some basic concepts does not work properly.
As you read back the messages during beta you should see, that most
feedback came from me during those beta versions where braille support was
implemented and that I start shouting at beta 9. The reason for starting
shouting was, because I heard Dolphin was planning to release the product
and beta 9 was one of the last beta releases.

For future beta testing I like to advice Dolphin to better communicate with
the beta testers. For example give them feedback on suggestions they do for
improvement. Maintain a list of problems to be solved and when you are
thinking they will be solved. I agree that we as beta testers are not
responcible for the product quality. But there is one important difference
with non AT products. Most of us are also users and dependend of the product.

Some AT Vendors do not want to see critical persons on their beta list. I
hope Dolphin does not exclude critical testers from their beta tests in the
future, because in practice this shall also result in a less quality product.


2. SUPERNOVA 5

I like to give you some feedback on Supernova. Most of these points
were already mentioned during beta testing.

STONG POINT OF SUPERNOVA

- PERFORMANCE

Since beta 12 the performance of Supernova is excelent and much better than
competetive products or product combinations.

MAGNIFICATION TRACKING ON VIRTUAL FOCUS

Supernova magnification tracks very well on the virtual focus. This a
problem with most orther product combinations.

STABILITY

Supernova 5 seems to be very stable. I didn't crash in Windows 95 and 98.

WEAK POINTS

INTERNET SUPPORT

A lot of comments I made during beta were about the lack of Internet
support. All Supernova 4.5 users in the Netherlands used Web Wizard to
access the Internet. Also WebFormator with Supernova on Windows 98 or
higher works very well.
The auto virtual focus is a good concept, but in my opinion it must be
highly improved to be successful. It cause a lot of irritation.

In my opinion the end users should not  realy need to understand the
concept. That means, that in virtual focus the system acts like it does
without virtual focus. Now in virtual focus I can not click the left mouse
button to activate a hyperlink, press a button or move the input caret into
an input box. Now in virtual focus pagedown does not cause what it should
cause (skipping to the next screen). Now switching from Internet Explorer
to another page and back causes virtual focus to jump to the top, instead
of jumping back to the location in the document I was.
I gave Dolphin some example URL's where the virtual focus seems not to
work. On that URL's auto paging does not work and it is very hard to read
these pages with Supernova. I gave Dolphin examples of URL's where
Supernova does not read all the information on the page.
Most low vision users define their own font size and style. Information
that is outside the screen on a web page (scroll bars) is not displayed on
the braille display.
I never got any answers on this kind of comments. But I'm sure the product
was highly improved if this kind of problems were solved.

USER INTERFACE

It seems that nearly everybody in the world agrees about the ugly user
interface of Supernova. Why doesn't Dolphin redesign that interface?
You are often referring to "old users". Those who use Dolphin products for
years. Are "old users" the standard for Dolphin? Don't you listen to
Dealers and training people? Don't you listen to new users?

MAGNIFICATION IMPROVEMENTS

It is a pitty, that there are no new magnification features implemented in
version 5. In the past I suggested a number of new features to Dolphin.
Most of those suggestions seems to be implemented in ZoomText 8 now. Hope
we see this kind of features also in future releases of Dolphin products
and I hope Dolphin continues to support magnification needs of many users.

In spite of our conflict in beta testing i had no bad feelings to Dolphin.
Every company has his own culture and some are more open in communication
as orthers.
For informing the thousands of visitors at magnifiers.org I need up-to-date
information from AT Vendors.

I hope we can still work together in the future?

Regards Peter Verhoeven
Internet : http://www.magnifiers.org (The Screen Magnifiers Homepage)


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html