On Thu, 27 Jul 2000 01:03:41 +0000, Bastiaan Edelman wrote:
> * It would be theoretically possible for her to use some special equipment
> * that would enable her to click on ikons and graphics buttons. She could
> * use a keypad-cursor and a menu-pad to substitute for a mouse. The keypad
> * cursor has a magnetic pickup coil that knows where it is on the menu-pad.
> ======= snip ======
> * I have several years of working experience with keypad cursors and
> * menu-pads. I used this kind of technology when I used to work in digital
> * mapping for the United States Geological Survey. It never ocurred to me
> * at the time that this kind of technology could find some great usefulness
> * among visually-impared computer operators. Doubtless the idea surely has
> * already ocurred to the nerd community, and there probably has already
> * been some highly sophisticated developments along such lines. Sam Heywood
> Does this mean that buttons and ikons have to be at a fixed place on the
> screen? Some of them are, eg. press F10, but not always. The buttons in the
> right toolbar are not. Also "reply to" is not always present (the bug).
Yes, buttons and ikons would always have to be in a fixed place. This is
the drawback in such a system; however, different menu pads could be
overlaid for different pages, and you would have to tell the interface
system which screen you are accessing.
> Maybe we could make the buttons and ikons to sound if touched by the cursor.
> Eg. "get mail" could sound the PC-speaker "GM" in morse code or something like
> that.
Good idea. The problem is that the user doesn't know just where the buttons
and ikons are on the screen. He would have to probe for them by using some
kind of search pattern. If there were a table having all the buttons at the
same location on every screen, then such a system would probably work fine.
> I recently used the POP.log and SMTP.log and found a complete list (pure
> ASCII) of the mail... all the TO and FROM stuff plus the text of each mes-
> sage... can we do something with that?
Very interesting. I've never looked into the POP and SMTP mail logging
features. I think we could do something with that. Nevertheless, I
believe it would be far easier for the visually impaired to use such
programs as Net-Tamer, Lynx, and Bobcat instead of Arachne.
All the best,
Sam Heywood
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