According to Amanda:
# But we're talking about attracting blind users, right? Shells and
# terminals are more natural for us than GUIs. Instructing the computer
# is far more intuitive than pretending that it's a two-dimensional
# surface with pictures on it.
Yes and no. First and foremost, I personally deal mostly with the
general public at large, so it's more important that I have the
accessibility I need to work with them most effectively than what I want
for myself, even if the shell is what I want. That said, I personally
find the keyboard input and menu-driven aspects of most graphical
environments to be more intuitive than the cryptic commands the shell
many times requires. If I was able to simply tell the computer something
like: "Read my e-mail" and it would know exactly what parts of what
messages I want to read without me having to give a full command to
delete one, go to the next one, read that, whatever, then I may feel
differently. But all e-mail programs require some form of menu-based or
similar system, and I do prefer the presentation of Seamonkey or
Thunderbird over that of the text-based applications, especially since I
don't have to worry about where in the message my screen ends or how to
get out of a quote from one of those ever-popular bottom posters, as
Orca gives me a quick and easy escape. I do prefer the shell to move
files and such, but renaming is actually easier from a graphical file
manager, as it pops up a text box that I can edit, copy, paste, whatever
in order to change part of the name without having to change most of it,
add things quickly and easily, etc. For the most part, the graphical
environment is quite intuitive, since what I see is the text menus, the
text below icons, tab order if applicable, various spoken controls, a
dynamically read e-mail that I can see my choice of line by line or all
at once, press enter once I get to a link to activate it, etc. I don't
see the two-dimentional surface or the pictures, so I only have to deal
with what is presented to me. I also don't have to figure out what
command to type next to get where I need to go or how to properly edit
the configuration file for a specific application, as the controls, when
spoken to me or presented in the menu system, do all that for me.
If you feel that a terminal or a shell is more useful to you, then by
all means use it. I'm only saying that the graphical environment cannot
and should not be neglected nor thought of as second-class access if we
want to attract users, blind or otherwise, who aren't at all used to a
terminal, especially in the days of mobile devices that don't just have
phone buttons on them, where many people, blind or not, have become used
to graphical layouts, and expect first-class access to same.
~Kyle
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