[Athen] Assistive Technology Use and Citrix's XenApp or Microsoft's App-V Virtual Environment

[Cassandra L. Tex]

Thank you everyone for the information!

I appreciate all of the responses!

Cassandra

-----Original Message-----
From: Greg Kraus [mailto:gdkraus at ncsu.edu]
Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2014 12:07 PM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network
Cc: Cassandra.Tex at humboldt.edu; Alt Media HTCTU Listserv
Subject: Re: [Athen] Assistive Technology Use and Citrix's XenApp or
Microsoft's App-V Virtual Environment

The amount of success you will have depends on what type of AT you are
trying to install on a VM. Most VMs do all the processing of content and
user interaction on the VM side. They treat your computer as simply a
keyboard, mouse, and monitor. You press space on your keyboard and it's the
VM that decides what to do based on you pressing space. If the VM needs to
produce a sound, it packages it up kind of like a WAV file, it ships it to
you, and your computer simply plays the audio file.

The reason this is important is because of latency. In the case of a lot of
literacy software this might be OK if you just need things like dictionaries
and word prediction. However, if you have AT that needs to produce audio,
users of any proficiency on that AT will grow quickly annoyed with this. The
time it takes for the VM to produce that audio file, ship it to you, then
your computer to play it is significant. Screen reader users will think
their screen reader, which must be running on the VM side of things, is very
sluggish. If you have literacy software that is highlighting words and text
as it is read, the highlight and the audio will be noticeably out of sync,
which kind of defeats the whole purpose.

Running AT on your local machine isn't enough. The VM is usually just
presented as a big picture to the end user, so AT won't know what to do with
it. What you really need is some type of bridge that lets AT on the VM side
communicate back with AT running on your local machine so that those
computationally intensive processes (e.g. audio encoding, transferring, and
decoding) can be off loaded to your local machine.

This is precisely what happens when you run JAWS and connect to a remote
computer running JAWS. The two versions of JAWS create a bridge so that the
remote JAWS can interpret the content in an application, but the remote JAWS
just sends a string of text back to your local JAWS telling it what to say.
All of the audio processing is happening on your local machine. Also with
JAWS, when you press the down arrow, your local JAWS communicates with the
remote JAWS to tell it to press the down arrow on the VM. I think all of
Freedom's products provide this type of bridge connection with remote
computers through RDP connections.

HOWEVER, it depends on what type of VM you are connecting to. At NC State
our Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) is running remote versions of the full blown
Windows 7 OS in VMs. When I connect to it through RDP, my local machine
thinks it's connecting to a real computer through Remote Desktop, not to a
VM. JAWS simply detects the remote JAWS working and creates the bridge to it
and it all works.

This is not the case with Citrix and others. With Citrix, the VM app is
delivered in a special container app on my local machine. There is no RDP
connection for my local JAWS to talk through. Some other steps have to be
taken, that Brian mentions, to enable all of the magical goodness. I have
not implemented it or tested it because the vast majority of our remote work
is done in our VCL, not our Citrix environment.

So in summary, it depends on what you are trying to get installed on the VM.
It's been quite some time since I've tested all of this but from memory here
is what I remember about the situation.

JAWS, works quite well if the bridge can be created NVDA, too sluggish
ZoomText, will work, but if running locally will only magnify the image as
it's presented, so there will be pixelation. I've never had much luck
getting ZT to install on remote machines MAGic, I think this worked well if
the bridge could be made Kurzweil, not all that great R&W Gold, not all that
great Dragon, had not gotten around to testing it in a true VM environment.
My worry would be that audio you send to the VM will get partially
compressed or degraded on the journey to the VM and cause speech recognition
to suffer.

I really need to update my tests because it has been quite some time.
I hope this helps.

Greg
--
Greg Kraus
University IT Accessibility Coordinator
NC State University
919.513.4087
gdkraus at ncsu.edu
http://go.ncsu.edu/itaccess


On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 2:51 PM, Brian Richwine <blrichwine at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Cassandra,

>

> We have been successful at getting Citrix's XenApp and JAWS to play

> nicely together here at IU. There was one particular individual at

> Freedom Scientific that talked our technical people through the

> process. Our native JAWS user pretty much couldn't tell she was using

> a virtualized app. The person from our office who worked on it is out

> today. If you are interested I will connect you two through email.

>

> Sincerely,

>   Brian Richwine

>   Manager, UITS Assistive Technology and Accessibility Centers

>

>

>

>

> On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 12:11 PM, Cassandra L. Tex

> <Cassandra.Tex at humboldt.edu> wrote:

>>

>> Greetings All,

>>

>> Sorry for the cross post...

>>

>>

>>

>> Has anyone been successful in using assistive technology

>> (specifically JAWS, MAGic, and Dragon NaturallySpeaking) in either

>> Citrix's XenApp or Microsoft's App-V virtual environment?  Our IT

>> folks are moving in the direction of serving up programs virtually

>> but we're having difficulty getting JAWS and MAGic to work in this

>> environment (we haven't even started dealing with DNS).  We do have a

>> remote access license for JAWS and MAGic.

>> JAWS is installed both locally and remotely.  JAWS works fine locally

>> and we can start the virtual programs.  However, once the virtual

>> environment is loaded, JAWS ceases to work.  In some cases JAWS will

>> echo the keystrokes, but in others, JAWS is silent.  Keyboard access

>> does work, but JAWS does not.

>>

>>

>>

>> We have the latest versions of both JAWS and MAGic...

>>

>>

>>

>> If anyone has been successful in implementing a virtual environment

>> using either Citrix's XenApp or Microsoft's App-V virtual environment

>> with assistive technology, I would appreciate it if you would share

>> your knowledge!

>>

>>

>>

>> Thanks in advance for your help!

>>

>>

>>

>> Cassandra Tex

>>

>> Assistive Technology Specialist

>>

>> Humboldt State University

>>

>>

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>

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