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4.2: What it Looks Like   
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4.2: What it Looks Like
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Think of a wooden desktop-Windows is a virtual desktop. Think of your display screen as the work area of your desktop. Launching applications and opening files puts information and work onto the desktop. These information and work items are known as windows. They are shaped in squares and rectangles, and they come in varying sizes-from tiny windows in the center of your work area to large, complex windows covering the entire work area.
On a real desktop you might have a couple books open. You might have an open notebook and some loose pages of notes. You may have a few smaller note cards sitting under a book. You might also have a telephone, a tape recorder, and talking calculator. No drinks please: spilling them in your keyboard makes the keys stick and rusts the wires. Perhaps you are a neat worker and keep just one or two items on your desktop, or perhaps you like to have five or six projects out at the same time. You can actually use just one at a given moment, however, paying no attention to the rest, and you only focus on one part of the work item you are using. You can shift attention from item to item if you wish, but if your desktop gets too cluttered and messy and you try to take on too many new projects before putting old ones away, your work pace will slow.
Technically, any number of windows can be open on your desktop at the same time, and you can move them in and out of your work area. They may cascade, tile, or overlap (where the top window only reveals two sides and a joining corner of the window underneath). One window may even fully cover others, hiding them from view. So the desktop and your work area on the desktop can become a very full and cluttered place.
Windows programmers have the power to put images onto your display screen almost freehand, and they do take advantage of that power in order to create a visually appealing and intuitive user interface to Windows, exploiting Window's graphical capabilities to the fullest and giving your computer's processor-and indeed Window-Eyes-a run for their money.
Window Relationships and Appearance
Two types of windows are application windows and document windows. When you launch an application program, such as Outlook for reading your e-mail, you are opening an application window. When you open a file within the application window, you are opening a document window under the application window. Application windows and document windows are often referred to as parent and child windows. Parent-child relationships also carry over into menus and dialog boxes.
Windows are said to contain elements, such as title bars, menu bars, control menus, icons, tool bars, and scroll bars.
The Title Bar
Nearly always, a title bar is present at the top of a window, displaying various information, depending on the particular window-such as the program name, the name of a dialog box, etc. The title bar of an active window is displayed in different colors or shades from the title bar of any inactive windows that may remain visible on your desktop.
The Menu Bar
The typical application window has a pull-down menu bar located just below the title bar, with various main menu headings appearing in a single horizontal row.
System and Document Control Menus
To the left of an application window's title bar can be found a system pull-down control for displaying Windows system control menu. The control is a miniaturized version of the application program's icon. Icons are explained later in this section.
Many Windows application programs also give you an almost identical control, located immediately below the system pull-down and to the left of the application's pull-down menu bar. This is known as a child system pull-down. Generally speaking, the system pull-down lets you issue a few Windows commands for maximizing, minimizing, resizing, and closing application windows, while the child system pull-down lets you execute commands that generally do the same things for document windows. Different application programs, however, use the child system pull-down control differently, and many others do not have one.
To the right of the title bar and menu bar, typically, you will find tiny controls for using the mouse to perform the same operations available on the control menus. They are mentioned here for the sake of completeness but have little or no value to the average speech-access user.
The Icon
Icons are small, non-textual, graphical designs that represent an action you can take in Windows, usually by clicking on them with the mouse, but sometimes by focusing on them with arrow keys and pressing the ENTER key. The idea of having icons is to save the computer user from having to memorize so many keyboard commands to launch a program, open a file, etc. Inside application programs a row of icons known as the tool bar is usually located immediately below the menu bar. These help the user operate the program without having to memorize shortcut keys, function keys, etc. For example, an icon to start the spell checker might be a symbolic representation of an open dictionary.
The artistic quality of a program's icons are part of the program's appeal. The Window-Eyes program icon, for example, consists of a rounded rectangle, with a purple background, lighter on the top, darker on the bottom, separated by a convex horizontal line giving the impression of reflection. Inside the rectangle is a transparent circle with a thick, white border, with a slight shadow inside the top of the border, and outside the bottom of the border, creating a raised, three dimensional look. The transparent area holds a slight lens flare to give the impression of sunlight. Sitting on top of the transparent area inside the circle in an abstract drawing of an eye, consisting of a large concave arc, sitting on top of a slightly smaller circle. The arc represents the eyelid, while the circle represents the iris. A shadow causes the eye drawing to appear as if it is floating above the transparent circle. The whole icon, as is typical, measures less than a square inch on a 15" display. It is a symbolic representation of an eye peering out into an endless horizon.
Section 16.6 of this manual tells how you can easily construct a Window-Eyes graphic dictionary for pronouncing the names of icons as you run the mouse pointer across them.
Scroll bars
Scroll bars, when present, are situated vertically on the right side of a window and horizontally across the bottom. A scroll bar allows you to use the mouse to move (or scroll) an open window two-dimensionally on the desktop-up and down through a document window, for example, or left and right when the window is too wide to fit into the space allowed for it on the display.
Scroll bars operate differently; you don't select and choose them. You point with the mouse to the arrows at either end of the scroll bar, then click and hold the left mouse button to scroll the window in the direction of the arrow. Releasing the mouse button stops the scrolling. List boxes (to be discussed later in this section) commonly offer scroll bars for moving up and down through the list. Scroll bars are mentioned for the sake of completeness. They generally have little value to the speech-access user. Mainly they are offered as a convenience to the visual-access user who would rather use the mouse than the keyboard to scroll through a document window or list. The speech-access user of course can scroll vertically through a document with UP and DOWN arrow keys.