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

[Ken Perry]

Actually Richard I have programmed blind as far back as MsDos 5.0 and I have
used Linux since the early days of slackware .9.  It is true that question
and answer can be a good interface but It was never perfect you mentioned
the file dialog I will point at a more important one and that is the Edit
box.  Prior to current GUI's you never knew what you were going to get for
an editor and even now you are not even sure.  The problem is not GUI's per
say it's the problem of people not thinking of accessibility before they
code something.  For example you would think that all buttons should be
accessible but the problem is some coders think they must make a circle
button using graphics only and then that button becomes inaccessible without
work of someone using a screen reader that can label that graphic button.
It gets worse when coders create a graphic out of text and while the program
runs they change that text.  My wife has been known to look at my screen and
say um its right there in text you should be able to read that.  Well I can
now that I can OCR the screen with NVDA or Jaws but it's still an awe full
interface.  

You are write that a console app is very accessible  but it depends on what
you want to do you cannot really step back and make a command line editor.
If that was something people wanted to use they would still be using sed,
and Edlin.  I still use sed but not for serious editing.

Another problem with making console apps is that you have to make it.
Meaning we shouldn't have to depend on special made software and windows and
Mac are both doing much better now making things more accessible.  Now that
is not to say you cannot make specialized software but one thing to think of
is many of the instructors that help students with the software are sighted.
They expect to see a certain type of software and many are not willing to
learn special software for one or two students.  It is always wise to make
software universally accessible so that anyone can pick it up and use it
rather than making a specialized bit of software for one type of person.

Just my opinion though.

Ken
-----Original Message-----
From: blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Richard Baldwin
Sent: Saturday, January 07, 2012 12:45 PM
To: BlindMath Mailing List; accessibleimage at freelists.org
Subject: [Blindmath] How useful is a GUI to blind users?

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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