Re: Accessibility issues of GUI interface in Linux

[Hans Zoebelein <hzo goldfish cube net>]

OK Blinuxers, 

looking at the amount of postings, this topic seems to be a 
hit (we had it before, check the archives and search for 'access;gui'). 

Some annotations:

A WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) user interface won't make you
happy. What do you expect to get when you are working eyes free from such 
a setup? A WYSIWYG setup for a person who is blind sounds IMHO more like
a bad joke.

A poster wrote about his fears, that Linux could become "graphical" like
Windows. These claims come up periodically and it seems harder to 
fight them than a army of cockroaches invading a pantry.

In Windows, the application is built around a graphical window. Graphics
is built into the kernel of the OS. It is very difficult (impossible?)
to separate the application and its graphics output.

In Linux (as a typical UNIX like OS) you have a clean separation between
the application and its user interface. You also have the server client
approach where the server processes the request and the client presents it
to the user. It is therefore easy to write a new user interface
(perhaps based on speech) without rewriting the whole application.

Sorry to say that this theme seems to degenerate into another advocacy
thread. It is IMHO a good idea to do some information mining on the
Internet before going into a battle about user interfaces. 


--Hans
(maintainer blinux-lists)