Re: screen-reader versus self-voicing app (was: Re: Screen-reader behaviour)

On Tue, 11 Sep 2007 20:22:25 +0200, T.V Raman <raman@google.com> wrote:

> +Gregory's summary though written in a nice logical progression
> starts with a couple of strong assumptions which leads to the
> conclusions he arrives at.
>
> I've used a self-voicing app -- Emacspeak -- for the last 12
> years, and everyone here who knows me knows that I am more than a
> casual computer user.

Emacspeak is a special case, in that it sits on top of emacs and indeed  
provides an entire voiced environment to work in. But as DaveP and Steve  
noted in different ways, there are a lot of places that are not prepared  
to support emacs - if you can't work in Windows, you're not in the real  
world, according to these people.

The users of emacspeak I know are all serious computr users, and skilled,  
and highly intelligent. They get a great environment, but it seems not to  
be something that most helpdesks are even qualified to support, which  
makes people nervous.

Lisa also made the excellent point that speech output is not just about  
vision impairment - someone else having clarified that there are people  
who can see nothing, and people who can see very little, and they use the  
information in different ways.

I think it is fair to say that Gregory, in his quiet and retiring style,  
outlined what is the practical rule for a majority of completely blind  
users.

It is important to remember that there are a lot of different use cases  
competing in accessibility (there are relatively few people who have ever  
come across deaf-blind computer users and know how they work with the web,  
and I am pretty surprised that even the brightest dyslexic people I know  
manage to follow enough of this group to contribute to it). When we get  
input from deaf users and deafness experts (people who know what they are  
talkiong about and have tested it), it will get even more interesting, I  
suspect...

cheers

Chaals

-- 
   Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
   hablo español  -  je parle français  -  jeg lærer norsk
chaals@opera.com   http://snapshot.opera.com - Kestrel (9.5α1)

Received on Thursday, 13 September 2007 18:23:54 UTC