Having talked with another linux-competent sighted contact about ubuntu what he tells me is that on the faster machines there is no such thing as a 30 second delay as a ubuntu boot screen displays. In fact he tells me he has managed to get ubuntu installed on some systems and found the cmos announcements computers display on their screens displayed slower than ubuntu's boot screen did on those machines. Someone didn't take machine speeds correctly into account when the timer was written for that boot screen and it's posing difficulties for people with perfectly good eye sight too. Sorry to have to throw cold water on efforts put forth to date, but this is something that will continue to pose problems until timing mechanisms get replaced by interaction with user/installer type characters by means of the keyboard at lest as standard booting happens and once ubuntu is installed a user might make a selection to have ubuntu revert to the previous time based reboot behavior. That way the best of both worlds can be available.
