On Friday, June 21, 2002, at 09:08 AM, Linux Rocks ! wrote: > Dennis, > It was on the 11pm news (cant remeber which channel...) The non-windows, > non-apple laptop was used with a pair of sunglasses with what looked like > a > ccd camera mounted to one of the lenses. This guy was actually driving > (well.. in a closed parking lot... they didnt show him doing any tricks or > anything... )
I'll bet. LOL. There is a lot of money wasted on "techie" solutions for the handicapped that drain resources from simpler, cheaper solutions that could be of real help to a lot of people. Just my usually judgemental take FWIW. > EFN has a visaidpa machine in the office, Ray (the front desk guy...) > has > set it up and maintained it for about 5 years now... It uses windows and > some > special software (pcwebspeak) to speak the website to the viewer. Its > pretty > cool, but some websites really suck (specially if they have lame alt tags! > ). Most suck. The belief seems to be that some vision is better than none and most of the money goes into visual magnification and synthesized speech. Visual magnification lacks the efficiencies of braille contractions and have you ever tried to listen to robby the robot's voice for any length of time. My mack has really good speech synthesis and it very quickly drives me nuts. To make it worse, people who supposedly teach the blind to read braille by touch only learn to site read (I think this is correct). The result is that blind people go fish. And you are right about the websites sucking. I wouldn't say "some"; I would say darned near all suck -- big time. The don't even work for sited people and are a disaster for the visually impaired and even worse for the blind. Try to make sense out of some of your favorite sites by using lynx sometime. Imagine what it would be like crawling through the page in a strictly linear fashion left to right, top to bottom, the way we read a page. Just nuts. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), which I have been reading and which I believe came out of W3C, strikes me as naive and ineffective. The real hope, as I see it, is XML/XSL. By separating content from formate in a rigorous way, one can for a web site, you obviously make it possible to play that info out in whatever way best fits a handicapped person. Since in the real world (i.e., where most of us live, right?), people who design web pages barely have the funding and time or page design and written language skills to properly create a web site for someone with no visual, auditory, or cognitive impairments, there is _no_ hope they will get around to even trying to follow the WAI guidelines. As XML becomes more and more accessible and more an more used, it is my hope that one could create on the client side a browser that is adapted to a handicapped person's special needs. I believe this is a more realistic approach (i.e., a browser plug in). My special interest is in the needs of those who are totally blind. I had hoped to enter Northern Illinois University in a specially created MA program that would allow me to work on such ideas this Fall, but funding cut backs have shot that idea all to hell. But, for what they are worth, these are my thoughts on the matter, and I thank you Jamie for taking the time to reply to my question as you did. Dennis > Its available to the public during normal business hours. > > Jamie <snip>
