Demonstrating the power of Linux for blind people.

[Sean McMahon]

Sinse we're on the subject of gui linux, any opinions on how gnome compares to
using emacspeak with an appropriate windo manager?
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Janina Sajka" <janina at rednote.net>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2005 12:58 PM
Subject: Re: Demonstrating the power of Linux for blind people.


> Hi, Amy:
>
> Answers in line below ...
>
> Ghoston, Ameenah writes:
> > 1. I want to set up a Linux box with speakup
> > Gnome, and KDE.
>
> The "everything" choice in the Speakup Modified Fedora will give you
> that without additional knowledge or effort on your part.
>
> As an aside to the other debate that flamed over the weekend, this could
> not be said of minimalist installation strategies. In other words, I
> stand behind my assertion that there are advantages and disadvantes
> either way--full blown or minimalist.
>
> Unfortunately, the issue is fairly moot as regards Gnome and KDE. You
> are not likely to find much value there yet for the blind user, though
> your results for low-vision will prove a bit better.
>
>
> >
> >
> > 2. I have other projects to manage, so I don't want to spend a significant
amount of time screwing with package depencies and what not.
> >
> The major Linux distributions generally now do an excellent job of
> managing dependencies for you. The tool of choice on Fedora is called
> yum. On Debian it's apt, for example.
>
> Once configured, yum works splendidly and can even set to run nightly
> without user intervention.
>
> Please note that yum also supports package security through GPG keys.
>
> > 3. I am dealing with the gambit of blind computer users and so, I want a
setup that would work for your average user.
> I find this a most fascinating question.
>
> Who is an "average" user? More pertinant, what assumptions does this
> "average" user bring to computing? I could go on at some length about
> this subject, but will keep it brief.
>
> I believe their is no such thing as a generalized computing environment
> that can be used without some education and training. Even something as
> simple as the plain old touch tone phone requires training. Else, how
> does one know that you must first hear a dialtone before pressing the
> digits of a phone number successively? My mother can do that, but the
> concept of a cell phone is very much beyond her as are answering
> machines and voice mail in general. Is she average? Probably for her age
> group, post 90 years of age, she is.
>
> To bring this home to "average" computing tasks, I would warrant
> something as straight forward and simple as reading and responding to
> email is far simpler on Linux than on Windows--but that requires that
> someone knowledgable has set up the computer and email application
> appropriately.
>
> Would it be "average" to set up a user account that does not boot into a
> shell, but rather provides a brief menu of choices like:
>
> Email
> Web
> Internet Radio
>
> Ten years ago, many of us used dial up accounts with various isps that
> provided exactly that.
>
> To finish up my view on this subject, the blind person's computer
> interface cannot be graphical by definition, even when using a gui. If a
> gui environment provides advantages, and I believe there are
> demonstrable instances of advantage, these flow not from the graphical
> nature of the gui, but from it's object oriented nature.
>
> An example of how this fails on the console is the background of text in
> the cat or chain web browsers when dealing with a pop up or a drop down
> dialog box. On the other hand, drop down dialogs are trivial to control
> on Linux where they are not so trivial, imho, on gui platforms. Just an
> example of the good and not so good in one place.
>
> Janina
>
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