This page provides some useful advice for users of the Eurochance courses. If you don't find a solution to your problem here, send your questions to the Eurochance public mailing-list. You are also welcome to send any comments or suggestions to the list.
See mailing list subscription information. Please note, that this is an international list and the common preferred language in this list is English. You can post questions in other languages, but try to provide at least the message subject and a brief introduction of your problem in English. This will avoid confusion among those who don't speak your language.
The first thing you should do before starting to use the course is to read the "General Course Instructions", which are available as part of the course.
You should also use the help system integrated in the course. You can find a link to a corresponding help page at the beginning of each exercise.
Note that the help pages relate to the exercise types and there is only a limited range of exercise types. Once you read a help page for a certain exercise type, you learn to control all the other exercises of the same type. So you don't need to read the help for the same type again.
Moreover, most of the exercise types are variants of two basic kinds – the choice-based exercises (where you choose one of the predefined answers) and the fill-in exercises (where you type your answer into a text-box). In this respect there is very little you need to learn about each exercise type.
When your browser doesn't support JavaScript, the course is still usable. You just won't be able to use the automatic exercise evaluation.
In general, all the exercises based on choosing from a predefined set of answers will work well. These are the following exercise types:
A sound response is played when you choose the answer, so you know whether your answer was correct or not.
The exercises where you type into a text-box are a little less convenient to use without JavaScript. These are the following:
You can type your answer into the text-box, but you will have to check manually whether it is correct or not. To support this, there is an answer sheet link next to each text-box (the ? – question mark – link). Follow this link to see what the correct answer is.
The Dictation exercise is more or less unusable without JavaScript, since you are not able to play the dictation section by section. Also checking such a big chunk of text manually is quite difficult.
Also, without Javascript, for all the exercise types you don't see your score below the exercise.
Jaws has several settings for web-pages and our recommendations are listed below. Some hints for using exercises are also listed. Note that all the commands and settings described in this section are Jaws specific.
Personalized settings for a domain can be set using Jaws+Shift+V. The settings below are our recommendations for eurochance.brailcom.org.
You may prefer to use other settings, and one example is for "Links With Text Only: Screen Text". When using this setting a ? is shown in exercises. This ? means: "Show the answer sheet". To show "Show the answer sheet" set "Links with text only: title tag".
When using multilingual speech synthesizers "Language Detection: On" is preferable. If your synthesizer has one language only, this setting may be set to Off.
Jaws interprets the first table row as a heading row by default (even when this row is not marked as a heading). To fix that, you can set it to read only marked headers. This setting is not available as a "Personal web setting", and has to be set manually:
This tip applies to the following types of exercises:
Press Spacebar to check and uncheck radio buttons. Pressing Space again will not change its status, but the evaluation will be repeated with less response from JAWS. It is not necessary to use the Form mode in these exercises.
This tip applies to the following types of exercises:
It is not necessary to leave Form mode when completing these exercises. Your answers are evaluated when pressing Enter. Press PC cursor to switch the form mode off.
The dictation is only used in the intermediate course.
Listen to the dictation. Go to the edit field and press Enter to open Form mode. Continue as recommended by Exercise help.
Press Enter in the edit fields to open Form mode. Write your answer and leave Form mode again (press PC-cursor).
This exercise is only used in the Advanced course. The possible options for the answers are listed at the beginning of the exercises. We recommend the following procedure to switch easily between the list of options and the exercise tasks.
Here are a few tips for Window-Eyes users:
The courses can be used successfully with Linux console browsers, such as Links, Lynx, or w3m. All the browsers provide similar comfort, so the choice is one of user preference.
As of March 2006 none of the named text browsers has sufficient JavaScript support. If you use a JavaScript enabled version of any of the browsers, you will have to turn JavaScript off for the course. Note, that this may change in the future.
See Surviving without JavaScript for more information on how to use the course without JavaScript.
Except for the lacking JavaScript support, the course works well with w3m-el in Emacs (with both Emacspeak and Speechd-el). See Surviving without JavaScript for more information on how to use the course without JavaScript.
To configure w3m-el to play the recordings, you should customize the variable w3m-content-type-alist. If you don't have an item for the content type "audio/mpeg", add one. Set the Regexp to a String value "\.[mM][pP]3$" and configure the External viewer to an appropriate Command, such as mpg123. Set the Arguments to pass file.
Note, that w3m-el reloads the page every time you play a sound. As a consequence, you will always go to the beginning of the current document. To get back to the place where you invoked the playback, you will have to invoke the command w3m-view-previous-page (the 'p' key or left arrow).
Feel free to contact Free(b)soft mailing-lists for more support with using w3m-el. See http://www.freebsoft.org for more information.
This combination is experimental at the time of writing and thus it is not very suitable for common use. However it is a very promising technology. Firefox and Mozilla browsers work very well with the course and the Orca screen-reader is making great progress lately. It can be expected to work soon.
Currently (March 2006) you will need a special accessibility build of the browser as well as a development version of the screen-reader. Thus it is more for the adventurous than for ordinary users. Please contact the mailing-list for more information (see above).
This combination is the only full-featured solution which is completely based on Free Software. It supports JavaScript and thus all the interactive features.