>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.
Alain,
please do finally throw that XML over board. There is nothing we can
do with XML that we can't do with a binary file format. It's the
viewer that displays web pages as Braille. And we can't display a
HyperCard stack in a web browser (the way HTML does it). A HyperCard
stack is supposed to look basically the same on every platform
(platform-native look, of course, but besides that the same), and
that means pixel-unit positioning, while HTML is mainly intended to
hierarchically structure information, it operates using a "means the
same as" metaphor, while HC has a "looks the same as" metaphor,
extended with a "does the same as" metaphor coming in as a secondary
important component.
>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.
Speech Synthesis is easy, and can even be done in HyperTalk. As for
meta-data, that could probably be stored in user properties, which
are a de-facto standard in all xTalks except HyperCard, and thus a
very likely a good candidate to be in FreeCard in 1.1 or whatever
after our 100% HC clone.
>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.
Right. Also, many OSs will certainly provide a system-wide technique
for improving access for disabled people in time, so let's now draw
the line and hope that when we pick up this topic again they'll all
have settled down on a standard or at least finalized their
proprietary designs so we can support them THEN.
>Alain: 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.
I don't know, but we'll sure know once we accidentally do something
that prevents it. Murphy's Law, you know?
>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.
If you find anyone who has time to create a version of our web site
that includes special enhancements for the disabled, that's fine. But
I think most disabled-enabled browsers are able to translate HTML to
Braille Text themselves (after all, it's just a different font,
output to a special device, there's no translation of text involved).
You might want to make sure you have your ALT=-Tags on all images,
but I hope it won't involve more.
I really think it's premature to care about these things too much
this early in development.
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
------------------------------------------------------------
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'The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere...'
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