Some interesting thoughts, guys. Sorry if this thread has spun its course
before I catch up to it to respond. At it most simplest level, any computer
operating system, to be accessible for blind people must be designed in such
a way that it can be possible for the OS's developers, or for third-party
developers to add software and/or hardware that can do three basic things.
The access interface, sometimes referred to, somewhat incorrectly, as a
"screen reader," must be able to intercept any and all input going to the
system from such devices as keyboards, and programs, and intercept all
output going from those programs to the screen, and possibly to other output
devices, such as printers. Once intercepted, this material gets converted
from, usually text, to something that an interactive speech synthesizer can
convert to phonemes which can be strung together to give spoken output. Or,
that output must be able to be sent to an interactive "refreshable" braille
display or to a very-high-contrast much enlarged image on a good quality
monitor. The output devices must be able to communicate back with the
interface software such that the user can control stopping and starting of
the information stream, the rate at which it is accessed, and the size of
blocks of the data that will be accessed at one time, such as one character,
word, line, sentence, or paragraph, or screen, or whole document. The
simplest OS to make accessible to totally blind people is one which is
completely character-based, no pictures, and no graphical representations of
text, as in pictures of printed pages. The classic example of such an
interface is, surprise! DOS with its outputs being sent to the screen
through the computer's BIOS routines.
When the interface gets graphical and visual in nature, then much more work
must be done to try to interpret the presented data in a form that the
access software can then sent to the character-oriented, line-oriented
output devices that blind people use to access the information that is going
to their programs, and to their screens.
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Brent Reynolds, Atlanta, GA USA
There's a blind man looking for a shadow of doubt.
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