[SEC508] Audible indicator when pc is working

["Barrett, Don" <Don.Barrett@ed.gov>]

The following message was crafted by Doug Lee, who has an innovative
approach for tracking CPU sounds when the screen readers fall silent.
It's quite interesting and very creative.
(following message from Doug Lee)

Please forward as appropriate, as I'm not on that list:

I'll explain the coil-and-amp solution shortly, after mentioning a few
more conventional approaches to this problem.

Years ago, someone wrote a utility called Feep, the name of which was to
signify something less obtrusive than a beep, for the purpose of
monitoring CPU activity with sound.  It would produce changing sounds
based on what was going on, such as when an hour glass was showing.  I
have no idea what became of the utility or the idea, but it might be
worth researching.  Screen readers like JAWS can also inform users of
when the cursor changes to an hour glass.

But any solution that itself requires CPU cycles will fail when things
get too crazy, which is a big reason I use the following less
established approach:

Ingredients:  One telephone pick-up coil from Radio shack, roughly
$2.00, one small speaker/amplifier from Radio Shack, roughly $25.00 last
I checked, one 9-volt battery.  You can actually use a number of things
in place of the amplifier, such as a tape recorder and headphones if the
tape recorder lets you hear from a plugged-in microphone in real time
through the headphones.

How it works: The telephone pick-up, which is a coil of wire attached to
the back of a suction cup, picks up electromagnetic fields.  A lot of
things generate those, such as fan motors, disk drives, CDROM motors and
steppers, and even the CPU of a computer.  You just move the coil around
until you find what you want to listen to.

Typical scenario:  I'm working at a work site, using JAWS, and all at
once, JAWS stops speaking and, horror of horrors, Narrator won't come up
either.  Or maybe I booted the machine only to find that no speech came
back up with it.

When this sort of thing happens to me, anyone sitting in my vicinity in
the office will usually see me bend down, fish this amp/coil combination
my coworkers sometimes call my stethoscope out of my bag, turn it on,
and start moving the coil around on the computer case looking for
something that sounds like the CPU.  Curiously enough, I rarely have to
get to where the CPU is actually located; I often find a good spot along
the front or side of tower cases or the front edge of a desktop case.
The best spot varies widely on laptops, but so far I haven't discovered
a computer without someplace I can use to listen to its activity.

What sound to look for:  For the CPU sounds, that's hard to describe
without reference to an actual sound, and it's harder still because it
varies from computer to computer.  My best advice for anyone starting
out with this would be to experiment on a machine you often use and find
a place where you hear a change in sound when you make the computer do
something substantial, like opening Word or a web page.  That same spot
will probably make a lot of noises when your machine is booting too,
almost reminiscent of the sounds you might hear in older movies to
indicate that a computer is busy chewing on something.

The easiest useful thing to find will probably be the hard drive.  The
motor of a hard drive, when the drive is not busy doing something, will
produce a whirring sound that is constant, so you can pinpoint it with
the coil.  When something accesses the drive, you will start hearing
bursts of additional sound.  This is a good way to tell if, say, Windows
is still loading or if it has given up and decided to ask you something
without bothering to talk about it.

Most of the problems we have with non-talking computers, though, won't
announce themselves clearly from the hard drive's location.  It's
necessary to get a bearing on what the CPU itself is doing.

When looking for CPU sound, I tend to look for an area that seems to
produce more high frequencies.  If I'm in doubt about a spot, I might
hold the Ctrl key down and see if I can hear rhythmic clicks until I
release it.  This will make CPU sound without also making hard drive
sound, so the two can more easily be distinguished.  Sometimes though,
the keyboard tactic produces only very subtle changes at even the best
monitoring location.

What's normal and what's trouble?  If you know something of what your
machine is supposed to sound like, you'll start to notice when it sounds
different.  I'm sure that's little help in the beginning, but after
doing this for a while, you will begin to recognize patterns that exist
across many machines.  Again though, I find these hard to describe
specifically.

I'll try to describe a few sounds and their meanings that I've noticed
across several machines:

When JAWS is running, on some machines at least, I can hear a pattern of
sound vaguely like an idling car, probably caused by JAWS scanning video
memory or something.  JAWS can also cause a sort of high buzz, maybe
around 250 Hz or so, but the buzz tends to stop when you tap the Ctrl
key and at some other times.  This one is dependent on the sound drivers
and/or sound hardware in use on the machine.  I think this is more of an
issue with USB sound devices.

As I already mentioned, loading a large application makes the hard drive
noisy.  It also makes the CPU produce a lot of random noise--you may
hear something like the hard drive noise, then some short varying rough
tones, clicks, beeps, and just about everything imaginable.
When nothing is loading though, the CPU should start to sound like a
constant, even if complex, idle.

Patterns that mean something predictable:  A sudden long tone, usually
rough in character, that seems to stop all other sounds is often a loop
of some sort.  If a JAWS script gets stuck in a loop, this can happen.
If the tone descends over time, it's a loop that is slowing down, and in
my experience, that can mean it is busily eating up memory as well.  A
quick ascending or descending burst is often a set of nested loops that
are doing what they're supposed to do, such as sorting or indexing
something.  A bunch of random sound sort of like an old hard drive
running all over the place often occurs when a program is loading, a
task is taking focus, or something similarly massive is afoot.  When the
machine is power-cycling, such as during a Restart, there will usually
be a very short period where you hear very little at all from the CPU,
and what you do hear will be unusually clean high-pitch sounds, not the
rough stuff you get from running Windows.

Finally, and particularly on corporate and government equipment, don't
be too alarmed if an otherwise calm and well-behaved machine suddenly
produces an unexpected burst of activity when you did nothing to cause
it.  Virus scanners, network software pushes, and the like will do this.
If it's your own computer you're watching, you might be able to figure
out what caused the commotion by checking what you have running.  I do
regard this coil-and-amp, though, as one pretty decent way to detect
unauthorized activity on my machine.  After all, you can make it
invisible, you can make it hidden, you can even make it evade easy
capture; but all you make it do still goes through the CPU...

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 04:25:12PM -0700, Jonathan Avila wrote:

   fyi


   From: Barrett, Don [mailto:Don.Barrett@ed.gov]
   Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2008 7:31 PM
   To: Jonathan Avila
   Subject: RE: [SEC508] Audible indicator when pc is working


   Thanks Jonathan; if Doug wouldn't mind sharing details, it would be
   very helpful to folks on the list I would think.  Sounds very cool.
   Don
   -----Original Message-----
   From:   Jonathan Avila [[1]mailto:jon.avila@ssbbartgroup.com]
   Sent:   Wed 9/24/2008 7:10 PM
   To:     Barrett, Don
   Cc:
   Subject:        RE: [SEC508] Audible indicator when pc is working
   Doug Lee uses a coil and amplifier for just the purpose!
   Jonathan
   -----Original Message-----
   From: sec508-admin@trace.wisc.edu
   [[2]mailto:sec508-admin@trace.wisc.edu] On
   Behalf Of Barrett, Don
   Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2008 5:01 PM
   To: sec508@trace.wisc.edu
   Subject: RE: [SEC508] Audible indicator when pc is working
   If there aren't triggered events which can be tracked as Peter
   suggests,
   perhaps a utility which could monitor the CPU cycles in Performance,
   and
   play a sound if a service or program uses over a prespecified number
   of
   cycles would help.  I have had Outlook take over the cup for 90% of
   the
   cycles updating a .pst file or something similar, but couldn't get
the
   screen reader to respond on the Performance tab as it became so
   sluggish; a smaller independent utility might have better luck; I am
   not
   a programmer so don't know how practical my suggestion might be, but
   it
   can't hurt to postulate, right?
   Don
   Don Barrett
   Section 508 Coordinator
   U.S. Dept. of Education
   400 Maryland Avenue, SW
   LBJ, 1W116
   Washington, DC 20202
   (202) 453-7320
   -----Original Message-----
   From: sec508-admin@trace.wisc.edu
   [[3]mailto:sec508-admin@trace.wisc.edu]
   On Behalf Of Roeder, Joe
   Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2008 11:42 AM
   To: sec508@trace.wisc.edu
   Subject: [SEC508] Audible indicator when pc is working
   Is there any way to have an audible indication that the pc is working
   when the screen reader is suspended?
   Sighted users have visual indicators (like the spinning globe) to let
   them know the pc is still processing.  The screen readers will say
   things like "please wait ...", but not always.
   I'm sure all screen reader users have had the experienced where their
   pc
   stops talking and eventually they powered off the pc to start over.
I
   think this sometimes results in damaged files.  Recently we seem to
be
   having more incidents of screen reader users powering off their
   stalled
   computers and having more damaged files.
   As a matter of accessibility, shouldn't the operating system also
   provide and audible indicator whenever they provide a visual
indicator
   to warn users that the computer is processing?  Or is there a simple
   utility that could accomplish this?
   Joe Roeder
   Senior Access Technology specialist
   National Industries for the Blind
   phone: (703) 310-0524
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References

   1. mailto:jon.avila@ssbbartgroup.com
   2. mailto:sec508-admin@trace.wisc.edu
   3. mailto:sec508-admin@trace.wisc.edu
   4. http://trace.wisc.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/sec508
   5. http://trace.wisc.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/sec508

--
Doug Lee, Senior Accessibility Programmer SSB BART Group -
Accessibility-on-Demand mailto:doug.lee@ssbbartgroup.com
http://www.ssbbartgroup.com "While they were saying among themselves it
cannot be done, it was done." --Helen Keller