Andrei, lets try to understand the problem before we focus on the specifics of the engineered solution. We should first put a bit more resolution on what it takes to be "Disabled".
Let me start with a few observations I've made. I've never seen someone with limited motor control use an Apple. It primarily tablet PCs or dedicated hardware. Of the group that falls under "Blind", I'd like to first better define the problem as Visual Acuity which can be broken down in to two major groups; Hyperopia or 'farsightedness' and Myopia 'shortsightedness'. -Very- generally speaking the first affects the elderly and the second is an eye defect. And, Hyperopia is going to be a significantly larger percentage of computer users as we all age and our eyesight fails us - I feel thats the business case for an eventual application based solution I others chime in with their observations... That said... if I may "bite" I'm surprised to see a talented designer such as yourself delve straight in to a proposed solution. If I may summarize your argument for fixing the OS with one comment you made "Text doesn't appear on your screen unless it was coded and rendered to do so." I, as a reader of what is on the screen in front of me, do not care about the code needed to compile/interpret/render the information in front of me. I just read, humans are system agnostic. I can read applications or web pages, games or graphics - what I describe as the 'visual spectrum' of information I take in. My approach to compensate for a lack of ability to interpret the visual spectrum would be to look for a solution not based in a specific OS or W3C standard. I'm suggesting a new layer that interfaces and translates between the user and the presentation layer. Build an engineering-out reader that interprets wpf, javascript, vista or OS X's core animation and you shoot yourself in the foot when that specific technology becomes redundant. I'm suggesting a system, based on my experience in working with people with disabilities, that tracks the user's eye (if possible) and reads that section back to them. Regardless, it monitors all activity on the screen, from OS dialogs to js interactions, read those and translate them in to audio or touch (the other two major 'spectrums', or senses, the we receive information). In short, an Optical Character Recognition based Intelligent Agent. Forget about interpreting what it takes to get those electrons to the monitor, lets just dynamically snapshot the screen and OCR it. I feel its going to be more fruitful to address the point of failure not the system. The underlying system will change, the issue of deficient vision does not. That point of failure lies between the user and the system presentation layer. I think I'll call this approach User Centered Design (o; cheers :-pauric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://gamma.ixda.org/discuss?post=21080 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://gamma.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://gamma.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://gamma.ixda.org/help
