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

[Tami Kinney]

Dick,

I prefer not GUI, but I'm an old-fashioned sort of gal. Well, I am 
having to relearn tons to remember how to use Linux effectively from the 
terminal again using speech and braille... Still, I consider getting 
back to terminal/command line use is worth the effort. GUIs are really 
convenient for people who can see them, especially if they process icons 
and images and locational relationships more easily than they do words. 
I'm weird, so always found GUIs annoying. Why can't people just type to 
tell the computer what they want it to do? /lol/

For students who are not so old or old-fashioned, I don't know how easy 
they would find the transition to a command-line type program. I haven't 
done command line since I lost the vision to see the GUI, so I'm in the 
process of learning to do things better while my brain does all that fun 
rewiring around the not having vision business.

I'll be interested to hear what you come up with and decide to do. I 
have some interest in doing some programming like that for grins once I 
get back to doing it for profit, too. /smile/

Tami

On 01/07/2012 09:45 AM, Richard Baldwin 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
>