Responsiveness Of AutoIt GUI's With Screen Readers

[batworx]

Hi everyone

I am a blind AutoIt user, and have noticed that when using a screen reader with GUI's I create, the responsiveness while tabbing or arrowing through controls seems to be a little slower than when using other applications. I've tried both MessageLoop mode and OnEvent mode. My code currently looks like this:

#NoTrayIcon

#include "GUIConstantsEx.au3"

AutoItSetOption ("GUIOnEventMode", True)
$MainWindow = GUICreate ("Test")
$OKButton = GUICtrlCreateButton ("&OK", 100, 100)
$CancelButton = GUICtrlCreateButton ("&Cancel", 200, 100)
GUICtrlSetOnEvent ($OKButton, "Handler_OKButton_Click")
GUICtrlSetOnEvent ($CancelButton, "Handler_CancelButton_Click")
GUISetOnEvent ($GUI_EVENT_CLOSE, "Handler_MainWindow_Close")
GUISetState (@SW_SHOW, $MainWindow)
While 1
Sleep (1000)
WEnd

Func Handler_OKButton_Click ()
MsgBox (0, "", "You clicked the OK button.")
EndFunc

Func Handler_CancelButton_Click ()
MsgBox (0, "", "You clicked the Cancel button.")
EndFunc

Func Handler_MainWindow_Close ()
WinClose ("Test")
GUIDelete ($MainWindow)
Exit
EndFunc

Now, if I comment out the Sleep line, effectively telling the While loop to do nothing, the responsiveness increases dramatically. However, Task Manager reports CPU usages of between 20 and 25% when doing this.

Does anyone know what might be causing a screen reader to respond slower with AutoIt GUI's? If anybody wants to run tests of their own, I'm using the free and open source NVDA (Non-Visual Desktop Access) screen reader, available from http://www.nvaccess.org. Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Regards,

Gavin Grundlingh

[BrewManNH]

Your sleep doesn't need to be that large, you're effectively slowing it down by a second every time through the loop.  A sleep of around 10 should be enough, although I tend to use 100 to err on the side of caution.

[Jos]

Try using a sleep(10) and see if that is working without a high cpu usage.

Jos

[Jon]

The Sleep in that While loop shouldn't affect the GUI responsiveness at all - the GUI can process messages during a Sleep. It's there purely to stop the tight While loop from wasting CPU. Sleep(1000) should act the same as Sleep(10). But Sleep(10) - or a Sleep of any kind - stops the While loop burning CPU. It's possible that the screenreader is hooking into the GUI in a way that is affecting performance. has anyone tried the code posted to check it looks OK without a screenreader being active?

[BrewManNH]

I only mentioned it because he also said he was using message loop mode.

EDIT: BTW, i also tested the gui posted and it works fine for me, but I don't have a screen reader running.

Edited December 17, 2013 by BrewManNH

[batworx]

I asked for sighted assistance to see if the responsiveness differs visually, and was told it remains the same. The screen reader I'm using is non-video-based. As far as I know, it uses IAccessible, IAccessible2, and UIA (where possible) to get its information. Screen readers that use custom mirror display drivers to access information, such as Freedom Scientific's Job Access With Speech (JAWS) and GW Micro's WindowEyes, appear to not have this responsiveness problem. I was just curious why NVDA is so affected by AutoIt GUI's when other apps written in C work fine with it.