Why we want gui [Was: speakup is nice]

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
As you say Janina people do need the best for them. Sighted people may
gain from all the graphical features of a GUI, and I do gain some
improvements in certain areas when using gnome (eg. structural
navigation with orca in firefox), but for other tasks I am certainly
faster in a text console with speakup (may be thats because I am a good
typist and at times orca can also be quite slow to respond even though
it is improving). What is really needed is choice, and Linux and all the
tools for it do give me choice. This is why I like Linux so much, I can
choose what environment is right for me to do particular tasks (my
choices may not be the same as yours, but you are free to make your
own).

Michael Whapples
On Mon, 2009-01-19 at 11:30 -0500, Janina Sajka wrote:
> Terry D. Cudney writes:
> >    Why do we want access to the gui? Only because the majority of the computer users in the world are sighted and they like to point-and-click. If  we had a java/javascript-enabled browser that worked in the cli with speakup, I don't think we'd be looking at orca or other gui access schemes at all. 
> > 
> 
> Actually, what we want is object access. To the sighted this is
> delivered graphically. To us it's delivered as textual data provided by
> those same objects when applications are built with toolkits that
> support accessibility.
> 
> It would be possible, theoretically speaking, to construct object
> oriented applications whose controls were exclusively textual. But this
> is not going to happen. Ncurses will never become gtk2.
> 
> As an example of what I'm talking about, I suspect you'll find the Gnome
> Volume Manager more accessible with Orca than alsamixer with Speakup.
> Please note I said alsamixer, and not amixer.
> 
> Of course, you're correct to say that sighted people prefer gui. And why
> shouldn't they? Why should they be limited to 8 colors and mono-spaced
> fonts, as in WordPerfect 5.1, when they (and we) can have all that plus
> 16 million colors for them, to say nothing of all kinds of embedded
> media objects in Open Office? That would be as silly as expecting us,
> mostly with great hearing, to agree to go on with dampened sonic input.
> 
> If you've got it, flaunt it, I say. Just remember to do unto others as
> you'd have them do unto you. Accessibility isn't about asking others to
> do with less, after all.
> 
> Janina
>