Re: Reading Kindle books on Linux

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Sam, you are disputing a point I never made. I never said the law requires a company to make their products accessible on arbitrary hardware.

My point is that using command line linux isn't simply a personal preference for some people. It provides tremendous advantages over the GUI. It's wrong to tell someone that their accessibility problems are the result of their preference for the command line when it's not simply a personal preference.

I get into these kind of debates on every list I'm on. When someone gets kicked out of a restaurant for having a guide dog, you often see people blaming the person who got kicked out. They didn't handle it correctly. They should just go somewhere else. Often the same people saying these things are most vocal about their own access issues. If they had gotten kicked out of a restaurant, it would be a huge injustice. If someone else does, it's their own fault.

No one on a linux users list should criticize someone else for their choice of platform. Otherwise, Amazon could say if you want access to our books, you have to buy our computers and use our software. And if it doesn't work for you, too bad. That attitude invalidates everything we've fought for for the past 20 years -- the Marakesh Treaty, the Chaffee Amendment, the 21VACC.



On 09/15/2015 09:24 AM, Sam Hartman wrote:
"John" == John G Heim <jheim@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

     John> It's not true that using linux at the command line is a always
     John> a choice. For one thing, command line linux runs on a lot more
     John> platforms than does the graphical user interface.

From the prospective of US accessibility law, I don't think that
matters.
You're not required to make apps and services accessible on arbitrary
hardware.

     John> And for
     John> someone who is deaf/blind, the command line interface has
     John> tremendous advantages.

I don't have enough information to agree or disagree here.

     John> When you say all these solutions are available for the GUI, I
     John> am guessing you mean they work with speech, right? How is the
     John> braille support?

You can certainly get the same information that would be spoken sent to
  a braille display.

It's been the late 1980's since I've used a braille interface for
interacting with a computer enough to have thoughts about what would
work well and what would not.
For me speech was so much more efficient that I stopped using braille
after that point.
Based on my memory of what worked well and poorly with braille
interfaces, and based on my understanding of the documented capabilities
of the technology, I think it would work reasonably well.  You'd want to
map some of the common navigation commands to things you could enter
from your braille display.  That's supported.  At that point, yeah, I
think the kindle app would work similarly to reading any braille book.

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John Heim, jheim@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, skype:john.g.heim

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