On Jun 11, 2011 5:27 AM, "Lisi" <lisi.reisz@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Saturday 11 June 2011 10:05:04 Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> > I've good luck, because I can skip a lot when watching at the monitor, I
> > guess using braille, people have to read much more irrelevant stuff.
>
> I'm fascinated. How do you read braille from a monitor??!
>
> My blind friends (even one who can read Braille at a phenomenal rate) all use
> text to speech software. Though the point about difficulty scanning still
> holds good.
>
> That is not sarcasm incidentally. I would genuinely like to know how you can
> use braille to read things on the Internet.
>
Yeah, there are braille tablets with mechanical 'dots'. However they cost some real money. Also as one who constantly brushes dust, skin, and hair off my macbook, I have no idea how you'd keep one of those clean.
So, people I've seen prefer speech. This too wasn't a cheap solution as windows software was $1k+ and a synthesizer was $200+. However, now most of the work is strictly software and there are free software solutions; emacs speak comes to mind (there's at least one other that I don't recall). There used to be issues with speech software on X. There's also an issue if a blind person needs access to the BIOS (though select computers used to output info through the serial port, and servers have ipmi). There also used to be an issue with remote apps on the windows side - I know Microsoft has pretty much solved this on their end but I don't know about citrix.
Now, whatever the price of this adaptive software, most (all?) states in the US have programs that pay for all necessary adaptive software / hardware and training. Despite the large amount of money spent here, there are serious issues with people who don't know hoe to write web pages. The other big issue is new cell phones that have few physical buttons (I have been told that the iPhone is better on this front than Android).
This is about 80% OT but you asked. I'm also sure that Google can get you more reliable info on this topic than I. Hopefully if you design software or web pages, you'll consider how you'd use it without eyes.