[Blindmath] Computer operating systems and accessibility

[Tamara Smith-Kinney]

Jason,

Thanks!  My minor was to be in linguistics.  Would you mind contacting me
off-list, since it sounds like your study is similar to what I was (and
still am) thinking of?  My addy is tamara.8024 at comcast.net.

I much prefer linux/unix to stinking windows, so it's good to hear that a
'real" blind person does use it for "real" work.  /smile/

Tami Smith-Kinney

-----Original Message-----
From: blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Jason White
Sent: Thursday, June 04, 2009 5:13 PM
To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Computer operating systems and accessibility

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.


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