[Blindmath] Computer operating systems and accessibility

[Jason White]

Tamara Smith-Kinney <tamara.8024 at comcast.net> wrote:
> Hi, all.  Since my major considerations in purchasing a new computer system
> have to do with whether I will be able to achieve my goals with it in the
> future, I thought I would ask this question here.  I am not, by nature, a
> lover of Windows and would like to make a change to Linux or Mac.  I'm
> actually think of a dual- or even triple-boot set up, but while I'm shopping
> want to find out what others are using and how.

I have been using Linux since 1998, exclusively for most of that time, with
both braille and speech output.

I have never even been tempted to use Windows for any purpose, since I find
Linux to be the ideal software environment to meet my needs.

I write all of my research in LaTeX rather than a word processor - there have
been many discussions of this on the list, check the archives for details. I
also find text-based tools (the shell, text editors, and other applications)
to be very convenient and efficient to use.

In recent years, the Gnome graphical desktop environment has become somewhat
accessible under Linux, including major applications such as Firefox 3. This
makes it possible to access, for example, Web sites that rely heavily on
client-side scripts, especially if they implement the W3C's emerging Aria
specification.

So far as mathematics is concerned (and this is, after all, a
mathematics-oriented list), there are numerous free tools and programming
environments available, although I haven't personally needed to make extensive
use of them, since my mathematical education in recent times has been mostly
in set theory and logic, areas that pertain directly to my Ph.D. research in
semantics.