Hello:
I think Mike Freeman is hitting the GUI problem squarely. GUI interfaces
convey information to the sighted not only in the words on the screen but by
the fonts, size and position of those words or symbols. Dr. Cranmer
described his expierence with symbols in the January Braille Monitor.
One of the reasons the GUI interfaces are so popular is that they allow a novice
to do many complex tasks. A toddler can easily learn how to use a Macintosh.
This is because the symbols (icons) are pretty obvious in their meaning.
The saying that, "A picture is worth 10,000 words." states our problem in a
nutshell. It is fiddicult to explain pictures in enough detail that we can understand them.
Even if you did explain the appearance of a screen completely, you would have so
much information, you couldn't remember the beginning. A reasonably skilled
GUI user can be very proliffic. The GUI interfaces simply provide a much
greater bandwidth. It will be interesting to see if the braille display GUI
systems can outperform those using speech.
Robert Jaquiss
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