[Blindmath] How useful is a GUI to blind users?

[Richard Baldwin]

It occurred to me the other day that prior to the advent of the Graphical
User Interface (GUI), the user interfaces for all programs were accessible
for blind users so long as they had a screen reader that would speak the
information displayed on the command-prompt screen.

For those who are too young to remember, programs in that day prompted the
user for input and the user responded in a back-and-forth dialog fashion.
Once all of the input data was provided, the program ran and did whatever
it was supposed to do.

Another way that information was provided to the program was in the form of
typed information (commonly called switches) provided by the user when she
started the program running. Batch files were often created with a simple
text editor to make this procedure less prone to typing errors.

The one area where I see the GUI being particularly useful for a blind user
is the file selection dialog. The use of the GUI dialog eliminates the
requirement to type long path and file names. However, if the disk is
organized in such a way as to keep the paths short, even this doesn't
appear to be a significant advantage.

For those who don't know, and without getting into the technical details as
to why, there are major problems associated with creating accessible user
interfaces when programming in Java. Using the SWT to create accessible
user interfaces significantly reduces the power of the Java programming
environment because it precludes the use of many excellent programming
libraries.

This causes me to wonder if, for those programs that are primarily intended
for use by blind and VI users, it might make sense to go backwards in time,
forego the GUI, and write those programs using the "old-fashioned" prompt
and reply style of user interface. I would be interested in seeing some
discussion on this topic.

Dick Baldwin

-- 
Richard G. Baldwin (Dick Baldwin)
Home of Baldwin's on-line Java Tutorials
http://www.DickBaldwin.com

Professor of Computer Information Technology
Austin Community College
(512) 223-4758
mailto:Baldwin at DickBaldwin.com
http://www.austincc.edu/baldwin/