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Worked on Workspaces at AWS for about a year, on the software clients in particular. I think their product has potential but for the moment is limited by some u

Worked on Workspaces at AWS for about a year, on the software clients in particular. I think their product has potential but for the moment is limited by some underlying technology decisions made in the interest of a quicker go-to-market. I would not be surprised if at some point soon their underlying tech became all first-party and we saw some significant improvement. There are plenty of resources throughout AWS that with some work could be composed into a better stack than the 3P pieces and protocols they use currently. I don't think I've disclosed anything here that isn't already public knowledge, past my own wild speculation based on zero knowledge of internal workings since my departure. If anyone has any questions that I can answer without endangering myself to NDA issues, I'd be glad to answer about Workspaces. I think it's a great product for those who benefit from it; I ended up leaving the team because while the technological challenges were interesting, I couldn't put myself in any potential users' shoes, and therefore really couldn't drum up much organic passion of my own.

jareds 10y ago
Is there any possibility of insuring that Workspaces will be accessible to users of assistive technology? I use a WIndows PC because that's what has the best screen reader support, a quick google search didn't turn anything up about running a screen reader in the workspace and having it's sound piped back to the thin client.
- commandshift90 10y ago
  I would imagine that if the screen reader running on the Workspace itself outputs its audio to the standard audio output, you would have no problems.
- mgkimsal 10y ago
  coincidentally, that's what I was doing in march, and... surprisingly, it sort of worked. client had JAWS, and the JAWS installer read itself to me while it was installing - I was rather impressed. Had to reboot, and it never came up after that - assuming it was related, but never figured it out. The NVDA screen reader did work, as well as the windows voice assistant thing itself. both would generate audio in the workspace, and I was hearing it over my el capitan local setup.
  - jareds 10y ago
    The Jaws problem may have been video card drivers. Jaws installs it's own video driver that I have found to not work under Virtualbox unless guest additions are installed. I could see there being something in the Amazon virtualization solution that could cause problems with the driver.
    - mgkimsal 10y ago
      I wanted to dig in to a bit further, but the client just reset the whole thing and said "you don't get JAWS now". Project cancelled soon after that - unrelated to JAWS/workspace. Don't have time now, but hopefully it will be resolved at some point. NVDA was 'good enough' for the testing I was doing, and it was pretty slick to know the audio was streaming and working without any extra configuration. Probably old hat for some folks, but I'd never experienced that before. :)
deleted 10y ago
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jareds 10y ago

Is there any possibility of insuring that Workspaces will be accessible to users of assistive technology? I use a WIndows PC because that's what has the best screen reader support, a quick google search didn't turn anything up about running a screen reader in the workspace and having it's sound piped back to the thin client.

commandshift90 10y ago
I would imagine that if the screen reader running on the Workspace itself outputs its audio to the standard audio output, you would have no problems.
mgkimsal 10y ago
coincidentally, that's what I was doing in march, and... surprisingly, it sort of worked. client had JAWS, and the JAWS installer read itself to me while it was installing - I was rather impressed. Had to reboot, and it never came up after that - assuming it was related, but never figured it out. The NVDA screen reader did work, as well as the windows voice assistant thing itself. both would generate audio in the workspace, and I was hearing it over my el capitan local setup.
- jareds 10y ago
  The Jaws problem may have been video card drivers. Jaws installs it's own video driver that I have found to not work under Virtualbox unless guest additions are installed. I could see there being something in the Amazon virtualization solution that could cause problems with the driver.
  - mgkimsal 10y ago
    I wanted to dig in to a bit further, but the client just reset the whole thing and said "you don't get JAWS now". Project cancelled soon after that - unrelated to JAWS/workspace. Don't have time now, but hopefully it will be resolved at some point. NVDA was 'good enough' for the testing I was doing, and it was pretty slick to know the audio was streaming and working without any extra configuration. Probably old hat for some folks, but I'd never experienced that before. :)

deleted 10y ago

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