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* Re: A comment on Slashdot that concerns me
@  Martin G. McCormick
   ` GUIs (was Re: A comment on Slashdot) cpt.kirk
   ` A comment on Slashdot that concerns me Tommy Moore
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 20+ messages in thread
From: Martin G. McCormick @  UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: speakup

	That's quite true.  The only thing you don't have is serial
access during the initial configuration such as installation or during
the boot sequence.  Usually, it isn't all that necessary to have the
boot messages talking, but it is nice to have that capability if
something goes wrong and it is time to start being a diagnostition.

	I also got on to slashdot.org and read a lot of the linux VS
Windows thread.  I am not sure if some of those folks are actually
serious with some of their assumptions or are just jerking our chains
to see what we do.

	Anyway, the one thing I have not heard anybody say is that a
text-based interface is usable by everybody by one means or another.
A so-called graphical interface must be modified for any other form of
access.  When blind people use Windows, it is only because there has
been some progress in making it sort of behave like a command line
interface.  There just is not a good way to directly translate purely
visual information in to anything else that works as well.

	There is an interesting experiment that Bell Labs did in 1951.
I remember the year because it happens to be the year I was born so
things like that kind of stand out.

	What they did was to build a rather clever voice synthesizer
for that day out of a spinning wheel with bands of holes in it.  When
the wheel was spun at a certain rate, the holes raced past at
different frequencies.  A light shown through the holes and struck a photo
cell like the kind used in film projectors to convert the wavy band of
the film sound track to speech and music.  By blocking or unblocking
light from different bands of holes, the scientists could produce lots
of musical tones of different pitches.

	The next neat thing they did was to record a human voice on a
spectrograph which draws varying lines on a strip of film that
correspond to all the constituent frequencies in the sound being
recorded.  In this case, it was a man saying "Never kill a snake with
your bare hands."

	They took the film and used it to block and unblock the beams
of light through the bands of holes on their sound generator.  The
bands of holes corresponded to the center frequencies of all the
octave bands on the spectrograph machine.  The result was a voice that
sounds kind of like a DecTalk saying the recorded sentence very
clearly.

	The spectrogram looks like strange light and dark bands on the
film and means little to the eye except maybe that of an engineer, but
it did cause the generator to produce pretty good speech.

	The scientists then tried to make speech of their own by
manually painting spectrograms in a way that they thought would
produce new words and voices.  It never did anything but make weird
noises.

	My whole point is that the easiest way for a person who is
blind to do complex tasks on a computer is to use text.  It may be
that when tactile displays become dirt cheap and we can put our hands
on a screen and feel shapes, we may actually get closer to using a
GUI, but right now, we only use Windows when it can be bludgeoned in to
behaving like a command line.  Think about it.

	By the way, the only reason I remember the Bell Labs
experiments is because they appeared in a Bell Telephone Hour special
in the late fifties on television and I happened later to read about
them while doing a report in Graduate school.  My memory back to
earlier times is probably no better than anybody else's.  Just thought
I had better throw that in.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
OSU Center for Computing and Information Services Data Communications Group
Tommy Moore writes:
>Serial port accss is allready possible. I used it for months before
>speakup came out. You just have to figure out how to get the serial port
>to let you login off of it so that you can access it from another pc.
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Speakup mailing list
>Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
>http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 20+ messages in thread
* Re: GUIs (was Re: A comment on Slashdot)
@  Martin G. McCormick
   ` Christopher Moore
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 20+ messages in thread
From: Martin G. McCormick @  UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: speakup

	I am glad to read this thread as I see I am not totally crazy.

	Someone mentioned Midnight Commander.  I am not sure what that
application is, but the poster made an important point
that I will belabor a bit.  There are accessibility problems in UNIX
even without X windows, but they are a somewhat different grade of
beast than the Microsoft variety of problems.  There are applications
in UNIX that try to create a certain screen effect that causes our
linear method of reading to produce results that are hard to follow,
but the big difference is that we may be able to easily fix it if our
screen reader can be controlled in the way it reads to us.  That is an
important difference.  It is possible that we may not know how to make
the screen reader behave or that the screen reader is not capable of
doing what we need it to do, but it could.  I know that all sounds
contradictory, but what I am saying is that the data are present.  We
may not like the order they are presented in, but they are there.  A
little example is in order.

	There is a command in UNIX called df which system
administrators used to see how full a file system has gotten.  If I
just type

df -k /home

from the shel prompt, I hear

Filesystem         1024-blocks  Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0    1893030 1167390   668850     64%   /

	This, by the way is from a Sun Sparc, so your mil age may vary,
but what all that was is two lines that form a little table.  The top
line is the name of the column headers and the bottom line consists of
all the values for those columns.  I must listen kind of carefully to
the stream of speech until I hear the very last element which, in this
case is 64%.  A better way to do that is to use nawk as a filter and
give a command like

df -k /home |nawk '{print $5}'

	That tosses out everything but the fifth column.  I hear

Capacity
64%

which is a little easier on the ears because you don't have to try to
sort out all the digits in the different columns.

	My point is that the data were there and I could doctor them a
bit to make them quicker and easier to read.  In the Microsoft-style
accessibility problem, the data are simply not anywhere to be gotten
using any kind of standard rules or functions.  Several years ago, I
seriously thought about diving in to Windows and trying to come up
with an open-source screen reader as my contribution to society.  To
be honest, I gave up right after I found out that each application is
its own little world and may or may not use standard function calls.
It is the ultimate nightmare scenario of the old DOS practice of
writing directly to the video buffer instead of using BIOS and DOS
function calls.  Microsoft tried to fix this with MSAA, but it was
like asking everybody to always say, "please" and "thank you."  It has
been an utter failure as far as I can tell.  The commercial screen
readers that are so expensive are so partly because one almost has to
practice Voodoo to tease out the data from various programs that each
do something different.

	I say flat out that MSWindows, NT, and 2K are all loosing
propositions as far as access goes as long as there is no sacred
method for handling I/O.  If this is ever fixed, it won't fix the
existing software base, but new software may work with some
applications having the second-level problem I previously described.
At least that would be a step in the right direction.

Martin McCormick


Janina Sajka writes:
>Isn't MSAA de facto evidence of the failure of MS operating and
>application environments for access. Put the other way, if Windows and
>Windows applications could directly support alternate interface
>technologies, would there still be a need for MSAA?


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 20+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~ UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 20+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
 A comment on Slashdot that concerns me Martin G. McCormick
 ` GUIs (was Re: A comment on Slashdot) cpt.kirk
   ` Janina Sajka
     ` cpt.kirk
       ` Mike Gorse
         ` cpt.kirk
       ` Janina Sajka
         ` cpt.kirk
           ` Scott Howell
           ` Janina Sajka
             ` cpt.kirk
               ` Victor Tsaran
                 ` cpt.kirk
                   ` Victor Tsaran
                     ` cpt.kirk
                       ` Matthew Campbell
                   ` Janina Sajka
 ` A comment on Slashdot that concerns me Tommy Moore
 GUIs (was Re: A comment on Slashdot) Martin G. McCormick
 ` Christopher Moore

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