Accessibility at NSW CLIC

Screen grab of the NoteTab interface showing the top menu, text from a readme file and Clipbook Library items at the bottom.

Most readers will be familiar with Notepad, supplied with Microsoft Windows. It is a very basic text editor. NoteTab is an alternative that offers many potentially useful features for both general and specialised editing. Some of its features are particularly relevant to people who have disabilities.

There are three levels of the NoteTab family. The free Light version offers basic editing, search/replace facilities and some additional useful features. Standard and Pro allow automation of general text entry and of specialised coding. Pro is geared towards coding, such as that used on web pages, and therefore does not offer proportional fonts. Instead, it includes tools such as bookmarks, line numbering and highlighting of HTML tags.

Convenience Features

NoteTab offers many features that make text and file management faster and more convenient. Some are summarised below.

• Tab browsing allows multiple files to be open at once and pressing ctrl-tab cycles through the opened files.
• A favourites menu allows fast access to frequently used files and folders
• NoteTab’s Pasteboard facility can store multiple selections of text copied from a file opened by it or other applications (the Windows Clipboard holds only the most recent selection)
• Two files can be placed side by side on the screen for comparison purposes

Text Handling

First impressions may be that NoteTab behaves very similarly to Notepad. However, further exploration of its features reveals considerably more power. Fontsize and style and colours are selectable (remembering that Pro has only fixed width fonts). Search and replace can be done in either direction or for the whole file and this can include non-printing characters such as paragraph marks. Selected lines of text can be sorted into alphabetical order. Pro includes a very useful bookmarking system, allowing rapid location of various points in the file. For people writing code, the “goto line” command can be very helpful, especially when responding to error messages.

Long lines of text can be split and shorter ones can be joined. Text can also be automatically indented if desired. A spell checker and comprehensive thesaurus are provided. Unfortunately, despite claiming to offer a British dictionary, words such as “centre” and “colour” are deamed incorrect.

Outline Documents

An Outline document can be thought of as a simple form of database. It is very easy to create and represents an efficient way of organising material. Having created the file from NoteTab’s file menu, it is first necessary to enter a heading. The text relating to that heading is then added. Additional headings and their associated text are then introduced.

When reading an Outline document, clicking on a heading will make its associated text available. Importantly, much information can be put into one file, with a theoretical limit of 2gb.

Clip Libraries

Clip libraries are scripts which can perform a wide variety of text input and coding tasks. Several are supplied with NoteTab and others are available from the website. People are encouraged to upload libraries they believe are useful and, disappointingly, the latest offerings were supplied in 2003.

As with most scripting languages, libraries can be quite basic or highly sophisticated. A very effective use of a simple library is to provide abbreviation expansion. That is, entering several characters can produce a longer word, a whole sentence or even many pages of text. A variation is to correct misspelled words automatically. The following demonstrates that learning to produce such a library need not be difficult:
h=”mds”
My address is 25 Apec Street, Sydney

With the library containing the above two lines selected, entering mds followed by a space, comma or several other punctuation characters, would result in text on the second line being inserted into the file. Similarly:
h=”acomodate”
accommodate
would result in “accommodate” being placed in the file if “acomodate” was entered.

As well as keying abbreviations directly, they can be selected from the screen with the mouse or from a list that appears when pressing the Escape key.

More complex libraries allow the user to choose from options. One example of their use is to place HTML codes into a file, including choosing from a list of parameters. Libraries for doing this are provided with NoteTab. By using these as templates, even more comprehensive libraries could be created.

While clip libraries are potentially very powerful, it is necessary to spend some time and effort for this power to be fully realised. Perhaps the lack of recent public contributions mentioned above reflects the lure of more stylish (and expensive) products.

Writing HTML Pages

NoteTab is not a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML editor. It is therefore necessary to have knowledge of HTML coding to create more than very basic web pages. For those who have that knowledge, NoteTab represents a very useful resource. As well as utilising the power of clip libraries, some of its in-built facilities help in the construction and editing process. Some of those features are summarised here.

• A plain text file can be converted to a basic HTML file and, conversely, an HTML file can be stripped of all codes
• Images, including dimension attributes, and hypertext links can be inserted into a file
• Outline documents, described above, can be converted to HTML pages. The conversion process includes provision of a table of contents based on the outline document headings.
• An HTML page being edited in NoteTab can be viewed in the default browser and a second browser of choice with a simple key press.

Screen Reader Use

Without configuring the most popular screen readers, access to NoteTab’s basic features is good. With minor adjustments to screen reader configuration, access to outline files and clip libraries is enhanced. In particular, it is important for screen reader users to be aware of the scroll bar icons to the right of the clip library items.

Among NoteTab’s huge variety of viewing options is one specifically intended to help screen reader users. By turning on Blind User Mode under the General tab of Options, focus is retained on items selected in outline files and in clip libraries.

Specifications

Manufacturer	Fookes Software, http://www.notetab.com
System requirements	Microsoft Windows 95 or later 32MB of RAM and 4MB of disk space
Cost	NoteTab Light: Free NoteTab Std: $US19.95 NoteTab Pro: $US29.95