Ask HN: Can you help out a blind guy by describing the look of an application?

It looks the way I would expect an older e-book reader application to look. It seems totally usable and intuitive. I know exactly where to click and what I might expect to happen.

There could definitely be some aesthetic improvements, but as far as "UI functionality" is concerned, this is great.

On the upper left there are the main menus, Document, Navigation, Speech, Window, and Help.

Directly below that are three tabs each containing a document.

Pattern-Oriented architecture, A system of patterns: Volume 1 (Wiley Software Patterns series) The Architecture of Open Source Applications (which is the currently active tab) Surveillance (A Chris Bruen Novel Book 3)

On the same line flush right are small left/right arrow controls that presumably cycle the tabs.

Directly below the tabs is the text of the selected tab, in this case its a chapter listing. There are 4 carriage returns between each of the Chapter listings.

At the bottom of the window is a Document Position slider, that presumably can be moved to scroll quickly through the text.

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Seems fairly functional to me, there is also a right scroll bar on the text field that I think serves a similiar purpose to the Document position control although less explicitly.

QRead looks like a minimal ebook reader application. There is a tab bar at the top to select an open book/document and the book/document is displayed in a large text field in the centre, looking not unlike notepad. At the bottom of the window there is a slider control to navigate the document.

It looks like a pretty typical Windows application. A bit simple, but there is nothing wrong with that. It looks like something a Computer Science student might build in Visual Basic for a University project. I think it looks a bit dated, like it's running on a Windows 98 computer. I wouldn't call it pretty, but definitely functional. I feel like I could use this application without needing to be instructed on how to use it. The purpose of every GUI element seems obvious, which is a good thing.

I hope I helped! Best of luck in your presentation!

At the top of the window below the window title are the menu items: Document, Navigation, Speech, Window and Help

Below those are open document tabs going horizontally - they can be very verbose like the entire title of the book with author

below that is the big document area there is also a vertical scrollbar to the right of the document.

Below the document is a vertical slider control spanning the width with the name "Document position"

And below that there is apparently a status-bar (like on web browsers, going across horizontally,) and seems to be divided in half for messages either on the left or right. currently blank.

A lot like notepad with tabs for several documents, which are also opened in the screenshot. At the bottom, one can see a slider with the title "Document position" for easy navigation. Most importantly the Menu consists of the entries: Document, Navigation, Speech, Window and Help.

How does it look to me:

It looks simple and functional. Seems to be optimized for screen reading as there is not a single icon or graphic.

What's the layout and do you think it works:

It's an older Windows layout with the menubar at the top, followed by the tab bar. Under that one, and covering something like 90% of the screen, is a notepad-like textarea and finally at the bottom is the slider.

Assuming the menu has submenus and it is not too difficult to navigate around there, I assume it works pretty well as it is as simple as it can get. Maybe the slider handling is difficult because I can not imagine how a blind person can ever click on the tiny position indicator. However, it probably has some keyboard shortcuts. But I can only imagine at this point.

Edit: Clickable link that doesn't download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/okt34fulaoxg3b7/Screenshot%202016-...