>> Adrian: Just a quick thought before I head off to Brisbane on work
>> commitments. When designing the UI, lets try and keep in mind blind
>> users. I have just discovered and reread a slashdot interview with a
>> representative of blind computer users and one of the comments he made
>> was that graphical development environments were much more difficult to
>> use than text based ones (obviously). If we could find a way to make
>> FreeCard easier to use for blind people this could be a useful
>> competitive advantage for FreeCard. (Not to mention being a good deed
>> for the day).
>
> Uli: How would we do that? If you can come up with some cross-platform
> system that makes it possible to support blind pople, 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.
>
Tom: I know a totally blind man who surfs the net with software that reads
aloud any text it can find on a web page. I assume he is accustomed to the
speech synthesizer and understands it better than we do.
We could easily do much better. Some rather simple code could allow reading
from each field in turn: "field 7 of 9; 'blah blah blah...'"; "Button 2 of
three; 'press to continue'". Pictures, however, might require a thousand
words to describe- still, the voice simulator could announce the title of
any pictures it finds: "picture 1 of 1; 'seashore at sunset'"...
The user could use the Tab (or similar key) to move from field to field,
button to button... When opening a new page/card, the software could
quantify the number and type of elements for the blind user. This would help
in deciding how to approach that page/card (whether to scan the buttons or
read the contents of text fields).
Should be easy to implement on several platforms. Even my Newton can do it!
The Apple utility that enlarges a portion of the screen is called Close
View. It is no longer installed by default, but it is still included with OS
9, and goes back to 1984 I think. I looked at it the other day, and it could
use an update for large monitors.
blessings,
Tom Swell
