> Adrian: When designing the UI, lets try and
> keep in mind blind users. If we could find a way
> to make FreeCard easier to use for blind people
> this could be a useful competitive advantage
> for FreeCard.
Alain: In this regard, it is too bad that we chose
against HTML/XML/Web as the GUI. Meta-information and
accessibility are some of the primary concerns of
these W3C standards. Web-based Brail-clients exist.
> Adrian: (Not to mention being a good deed).
Alain: This is definitely the most laudable part of
your idea.
> Uli: How would we do that?
Alain: We could provide a mechanism for including
meta-data in our GUI elements, like HTML/XML do.
Speech-synthesis is an alternative, but not a very
good one because, while the quality of
speech-synthesis is getting better, it is still
dreadful, i'm afraid.
> Uli: If you can come up with some cross-platform
> system that makes it possible to support blind
> people, that's no problem, but since FreeCard is
> based on visual elements (buttons, windows, color
> graphics) I'm not sure how we'd add support for
> blind people.
Alain: You make a good point when you insist that
FreeCard 1.x will be based on visual elements. We have
to draw the line somewhere, for now, and the
approximate equivalent of HyperCard is what we are
aiming it in the short-term. And HC has no provisions
for the blind.
> Uli: I'd say we just hope we don't add in
> anything that makes it more impossible than it
> already is to add support for disabled people,
Alain: I agree, despite the fact that your answer is
quite vague. What could we possibly do that would make
it impossible for us to adapt FreeCard to the needs of
the blind later on? Worse-comes-to-worse, we will do
nothing for them.
> Uli: but we should keep that for version 5.0
> or so. It's asking too much to get a working
> HyperCard clone out there and then also take
> into account specialties like blind people.
Alain: Unfortunately, I have to agree with Uli on this
one. Maybe not as far into the future as version 5.x,
but quite probably not in our first release. Our
web-site, on the other hand, is coded in HTML. So we
can accomodate the blind with regard to our
collaboration infrastructure, immediately if you wish.
Alain: This does not necessarily mean that our
web-site has to have a FAT version of HTML (eg. blind
and non-blind coded into the same page). We can,
instead, have two parallel web-sites. When the person
accesses the site, he enters his name and password,
which then allows my system to branch and/or
dynamically customize the client's output according to
the user's profile (prefs).
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