If I'm sitting in front of a machine, I generally prefer a GUI. Not so much because of any visual ability, per say. But rather, because doing certain things via a GUI is often times faster. Plus, there's times when I just plain don't feel like entering half a dozen different commands just to accomplish changing a setting or two. I know it's not a real example, but I'll use it anyway. If I want to increase the volume on a friend's computer because I can barely hear it, I shouldn't have to remember that I can't just do "echo 4 > /proc/volume" like I can on my system, for example. -----Original Message----- From: speakup-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca] On Behalf Of Janina Sajka Sent: January 19, 2009 11:30 AM To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux. Subject: Why we want gui [Was: speakup is nice] 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 _______________________________________________ Speakup mailing list Speakup at braille.uwo.ca http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
