On Tue, 7 Apr 1998, Kynn Bartlett wrote:
:At 02:03 p.m. 04/07/98 -0700, Michael C. Berch wrote:
:
:>Besides, the screen readers for blind users (for Windows and X) that I know of
:>are easily configurable to ignore (or otherwise deal with) rich-text markup.
:>(Otherwise how do you think they would cope with Web pages?)
:
:In general, blind people can't cope well with the web; most
:people design for "general case" (i.e., "whatever I had six
:months ago"), and the visually impaired have a hard time
:using the web in the same way you or I would.
Most visually impaired internet users use a combination of a text browser
and a braille reader/ speech synthesizer. Most visually impaired users
use text browsers because navigation is simpler for them with arrow keys
than with a mouse. A number of sight impaired users I have corresponded
with use Lynx (with it's nice "numbered links" feature for navigation) and
some sort of speech synthesizer to browse the web. Very few of them use a
Windows type interface since it is so visually grounded. Very few have
access to the, as yet, extremely expensive dictation/voice activated
software on the market.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] + Lynx 2.8 + NeXT/PGP mail + www.crl.com/~subir/
The engines of mass communication, in their highest state of
development, assail the eyes and ears of the community on behalf of more
beer but not of more schools.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society
