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mouse-based interfaces
``` [He's right.]
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Date: Thu, 6 Mar 1997 21:53:39 -0500
From: Dean Esmay
[...]
I was both pleased and disturbed to read Jay Hersh's comments on GUIs and the disability community in your recent RRE mailing, and a bit concerned about some of your comments on his thoughts. Not that either of you are wrong, but you aren't exactly right either.
The deaf child, the woman with multiple sclerosis, and the blind man all have fundamentally different needs, none of which are necessarily compatible. Given that, I'm not sure who Jay Hersh thinks he's talking about when he refers to the "community" needing to fight against mouse-centric interfaces, and I am even less sure that the waters aren't further muddied by your comments about the efficiency of keyboard interfaces.
I worked for a number of years in an employment agency for the disabled, and have attended and even led workshops on how to make computers more accessible to the disabled. I think three things should be kept in mind before anyone tries to influence how computers interact with people:
1) GUIs are substantially beneficial to some disabled users.
2) The problem with computer software not working well for some people has been around far longer than the widespread use of GUIs.
3) There is no one solution (to date) that works well for everybody.
Prior to GUIs, the visually impaired did pretty darned well. After all, text-based software can often be easily adapted to speech synthesis. While there were things to complain about, the blind generally did pretty good. But the blind are not the only members of the disability community, and the non-blind disabled were often still faced with serious aggravations, or even locked out in the cold. GUIs fixed that for many of them.
A number of devices exist that substitute for the traditional mouse, the best of which is a strap-on headset with which a person with no use of hands can point by merely moving her head (or even just her tongue if neck mobility is limited) and "clicking" with a puff of breath. Your beloved EMACS is normally worthless to a woman without arms. But give her an interface where she can point and click with her hands-free mouse, "type" clicking on the keys of a floating on-screen keyboard that feeds her "keystrokes" to the window of her choice, and that responds to specific voice commands for shortcuts, and she can do anything you can. In today's GUI world, most properly-written software can use such special tools without need for modification or special programming.
It's also probably unfair to lump Apple in with Microsoft. Apple has a long history of working with the disability community. Back in the old Apple II days, they manufactured special devices to help the disabled use their computers. When the Mac came along, they cooperated enthusiastically with the manufacturers of the hands-free mouse and similar devices, and worked hard to make their GUI and their API work effortlessly with such special tools. Apple also put a good bit of money into developing and testing their Easy Access and Closeview extensions, which ship free with every Mac/OS machine and vastly improve the interface for many disabled people (including some with partial vision). They even include system software extensions to make voice control possible in any program, and powerful built-in scripting that can automate many tasks in many applications.
Of course, Apple comes up short with some, especially the blind. That section of the community has generally stayed with the text interface operating systems that work best for them. But still, Apple has arguably done much to adapt to people with special needs, for which they deserve credit.
But let's set aside Apple, which is only one imperfect company. The fact is that today, a majority of the disabled can use much Windows software right off the shelf, too. This is a tremendous step forward from ten years ago. But the same GUI which has helped so many others is forcing the blind to the sidelines. It's damned hard to adapt a GUI to a speech-synthesized, sight-free world. It's not impossible; some very clever macro-based work-arounds do exist. But much more needs to be done to address this problem.
There badly needs to be a widespread discussion of issues like applications and APIs which just plain ignore the needs of the disabled. We need to encourage elimination of unnecessary popup menus and dialogs, buttons with graphics but no text, buttons with text but no graphics, hierarchical pull-down/pop-up menus that are a bitch to navigate if you can't see well or have poor coordination, and more. The blind also have a need for more productivity and utility software written specifically with them in mind; the market is large enough now that, while it might not be much of a blip on Microsoft's radar screens, it's more than enough for small companies and cottage industrialists to make decent money. I've met a few people who write that kind of software for a living, but there's room for more.
I commend you for bringing this issue to wider attention, and I hope you'll talk more about it in Red Rock Eater. But I urge you not to get lost in generalizations about what a vague, unspecified "disability community" needs, or tangle that up with what you find most useful for yourself.
In any case, thanks for doing something to at least start people thinking about these issues!
-=-=-
Once in a while you get shown the light/ In the strangest of places if you look at it right ---Robert Hunter
http://www.syndicomm.com/esmay ```
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