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

[Alex Hall]

My first thought is low-vision users who need accessibility for screen
readers or magnification, but can still benefit from a good gui. Also,
many tasks are significantly sped up by using keyboard shortcuts and
finding functions in dropdown menus, and you lose that when you use a
command prompt. Some tasks simply require a gui, too, such as sound
editing, web browsing (and, from there, reading of many emails), or
media playback (especially for skipping through tracks).
All that aside, there is still the overall question of specialization:
do you want to write a program that anyone can use, or do you want to
write a program specifically for blind users that no one else can (or
at least would want) to use? I see this as being similar to
specialized notetakers. It used to be that they were a good and even
necessary solution, but nowadays you can pick up a braille display and
an iPhone and have almost as much functionality for less money and
without dealing with all the headaches of supporting a highly
specialized platform (high overhead, long waits for updates, missing
features, and so on). Instead, you can get access to most apps that
anyone else has, plus the lower costs of the equipment and any
protection plans. When programming, I would nearly always take the
program that everyone else is using over a highly specialized program
that only a few are using. There are a very few exceptions to this,
the Twitter client Qwitter and its forks being one, but that is mostly
because it is the first program I tried and I have not yet tried, say,
the Twitter website with the GM script written by James Teh to enhance
NVDA's compatibility with that interface.

On 1/7/12, Richard Baldwin <baldwin at dickbaldwin.com> wrote:
> 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/
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-- 
Have a great day,
Alex (msg sent from GMail website)
mehgcap at gmail.com; http://www.facebook.com/mehgcap