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

[David Tseng]

Hi Richar,

In many ways I agree with your assertion that command line
environments provide a superior experience for many daily tasks. This
line of thinking fits well with the linux mindset and nicely
circumvents the pitfalls of accessible GUI design which in my
professional experience, is a neverending struggle. Getting pieces of
software to talk to one another is always a challenge and if you
consider the combination of platforms, assistive technologies,
graphical toolkits, the points of failure today are numerous.

With that said, the level of accessibility for GUI's on Windows and
Mac has reached a sufficient level where if you use common controls
and an established GUI toolkit, you will do just fine. These controls
expose additional information to consumers like screen readers who
then in turn can properly present the application in whatever form it
chooses. The trick is attaining a familiarity with this interface and
making sure that whatever framework you use (WX, SWT, Swing, Winforms,
Cocoa, etc etc), the proper symantics and data gets conveyed. There is
then adding keyboard access, which at a very high level, means making
your GUI work if you threw away your mouse.

Finally, as for reasons why to go through this additional work, this
accessibility infrastructure not only serves the blind, but many other
assistive technologies. Speech recognition systems, for example, use
the hierarchy exposed by your UI and potentially match speech against
the textual labels presented by your application retrieved via an
accessibility interface. A person with motor impairments might use
keyboard only and thus rely on a different workflow than your typical
mice depedent user. Some aspects of full keyboard access can be
controlled via accessibility API's, but it's usualy considered a
standard feature with varying levels of work for the developer
depending on what tools you use.

There is also the point of colaboration. If the application is used in
a class setting, a work setting, or in a group of any sort, the
disabled user should be able to take advantage of the group, the
sighted documentation, the resources online for help, etc. It also
remains a problem that when apps written specifically for the blind
come out, they receive very little attention from mainstream
developers and thus, eventually, lag significantly behind in terms of
features, documentation, stability, etc. I've seen this happen for
Windows app's, iPhone app's, and many other platforms. The only
instance where this isn't true for me is when the assistive technology
shares almost all of the interface with the primary user (ala emacs).




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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