From: Dominik Riebeling <dominik.riebeling_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 26 May 2008 22:52:03 +0200

On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 1:02 PM, Antony Stone
<Antony.Stone_at_rockbox.open.source.it> wrote:
> Show us a command-line browser which works with modern websites, and plenty of
> blind users will happily abandon the GUI :)

I find elinks (http://elinks.or.cz/) a quite nice browser when I
happen to need the command line. Out of curiousity I just tried to
access google mail using elinks -- and was able reading my mail! I
don't know a Javascript-driven site just of the top of my head, so no
idea what Google is doing to help it to work. Still I find this quite
impressive. No idea how good elinks would work with screen readers,
but it's a command line browser similar to lynx -- just better.

> I'm not quite sure what the above paragraph means in terms of future
> accessibility - does it mean that the toolkit chosen for rbutil doesn't work
> with current Linux screenreaders, or just that you have to have the right
> libraries etc installed in order to use it?

The first. Linux screenreaders use a different mechanism for
communicating between processes (IPC) than the chosen toolkit uses.
There is discussion going on to replace the used IPC mechanism to
adopt the one the toolkit already uses.

> I know of no other screenreader under active development than Orca, and it's
> easy for a sighted user to find out whether things work or not - either by
> using the speech synthesiser, or by using Brltty with the text window driver
> (so you see one line of text in a window, just as a blind user would see one
> line of Braille on a refreshable display).

I haven't thought about the option of a text window driver for the
screenreader. Good hint, I'll keep that in mind. Do you have a pointer
for me for such stuff on windows? Especially a textwindow-emulation of
Jaws would be interesting for tests.
Using a speech syntesizer isn't a good way to test for a sighted user
(at least from my perspective): I'm not used to the voices and find
the babbling rather confusing. I also have no idea how a blind user
usually expects the application to work. I'm pretty sure that an
application, even if all parts in it were speaking, could be a bad
user experience if the "flow" is completely unintuitive and / or too
mouse-centric.


 - Dominik
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Received on 2008-05-26