In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> you write:
Upfront, I'm not blind, but some of my users are. You wouldn't believe
what the stuff I do purely for them looks like. DOS text mode ought to
be king in the VI world, but you'll have noticed how much software is
being developed for that.
> What is the best computer interface for a blind user?
Text menus or nothing, ie no options at all. Not surprisingly,
simplicity rules. The way my blind users tell me to "see" what they see,
imagine a screen which consists of just the field the cursor is on and
that field is monochrome.
> The typical GUI is absolutly nothing that can be useable for a blind
> user (completly blind, that is). Command line interface seems to be
> ok, but it also have software which use menus and so on. Its not
> easy to be a blind computer user. Lets see how many of us can use
> their computers with the screen turned off..
Not totally true. Blind users have screen readers (actually screen
memory readers) and while DOS text screens are comparatively simple to
read, DOS graphics are impossible. Windows also has it's screen readers
and these are becoming quite good at handling the default interface and
the commoner variations. The way they handle graphics is to tag them
with a description, a bit like HTML IMGs are supposed to be, but
increasingly aren't :(
> I wander if there is away to make a completly blind oriented
> user interface for computers, which will be capable of concidering
> the monitor as "optional". It will use the speakers, or other
> external devices connected to the computer.
The ideal, they tell me, would be a headset - no screen, no keyboard, no
mouse. Spoken input and spoken/audible response. It's not that far away,
either, and possibly we'll all do it that way if the mobile phone/PDA
merger becomes the new standard.
> Lets forget for a moment about how hard this will be to implement due
> to market demands (graphics and GUI oriented software), and lets
> presume for the idea that planty of software will be written for this
> interface.
If you accept that a GUI is a must then it's Windows. Like it or not,
that is where the development happens. Most of it is crap, but there is
so much of it that the odd nugget does appear. Almost all of the blind
users of my stuff use W95 for it's scanner/OCR software and a mixture of
GUI and DOS for the rest.
> How do you think such an interface will work? (ideas, people.. :)
Actually, with a decent screen reader, W95 works OK. Not great, but OK.
Fran.
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