Let me first say that I am myself a massive fan of command line programs, but I believe graphical programs also have their place, and depending on the information being conveyed, can sometimes be more officiant for blind users. One practical example is when one has to sort a big directory of files, deleting some and keeping others. For this I would reach for a graphical file manager, or even dired in Emacs (which is also not a command line program, but a full screen program very similar to GUI equivalents.) My personal take is that the argument in that article was valid in the 90s when graphical screen readers were still very basic and quirky. The fact that speech (and braille) are stream-oriented interfaces, is a fact well understood by graphical screen reader developers today. Modern screen readers query the accessibility API and present to the blind user a view which is actually very similar to something like Edbrowse. To illustrate my point, if you take the experience provided by Orca and Firefox, swap out speech for command line output, and swap out keyboard commands for command line input, you might end up with an interface quite similar to Edbrowse. That is not to say that there isn't a place for Edbrowse, I think Edbrowse can be very useful for both blind and sighted users alike. I just don't think it is necessarily more accessible. Command line programs are also usually much more performant, because they don't need to do complex graphical rendering. This is of course advantageous for a speech user, and is perhaps one drawback that graphical user interfaces still have. I often wish that I could turn of graphical rendering completely in GUI programs, not just something like a screen curtain, but turning off the entire code path involved in that process. This might mess with spatial calculations of Orca though, for example flat review. Regards, Rynhardt On Wed, Apr 13, 2022 at 8:08 AM Linux for blind general discussion < blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I recently ran across this item on Hacker News ( > https://news.ycombinator.com/): > > Command Line Programs for the Blind > http://www.eklhad.net/philosophy.html > > - Rich Morin > > > _______________________________________________ > Blinux-list mailing list > Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx > https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list > > _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list