Hello, Liz.
Thank you for your most gracious and prompt answers to my questions. I
shall answer your questions and comment upon your proposal below. First,
however, I should tell you that I plan to attend the Friday session of
Microsoft's Access '95 conference. Whether this will pan out is anyone's
guess as I'm trying to arrange this at the last minute.
I deem it perfectly acceptable to design a PDF-to-ASCII translation
solution which runs on a 386-machine with 2 (or even 4) megs of RAM.
Although it would be desirable to have software which would run on an
8086 with minimal RAM (640K?), there is much software today which will
only run on a 386 or better and I have heard few complaints concerning
it. I believe that speed of release (consistent with good programming
practice) would far outway any inconvenience caused by catering to only
the more modern processors.
In some ways, using DOS Lynx as the platform for translating the PDF
document to ASCII is overkill -- at least, it is in my case. I do not use
a SLIP or PPP connection to the Internet (I'm too Scotch to pay the
required price and I'm not completely certain how well DOS-based SLIP/PPP
software works with speech). I use a dial-up connection to a
shell-account on a UNIX host and use Lynx on the host to browse the Web
(though I'll admit to being old-fashioned enough that I still prefer
anonymous ftp). Hence, a simple PDF-to-ASCII or PDF-to-HTML program would
fill my needs (there is already one HTML-to-ASCII program floating
around; I have it but haven't tried it yet). But if DOS Lynx will perform
without a SLIP or PPP connection and if it's easier to modify it for the
PDF-to-HTML translation, more power to you.
My question regarding the visual display doesn't necessarily make sense
in the Windows environment. I realize that your aim is to preserve the
visual display while presenting things to the screen-reader in a logical
fashion. However, most, if not all, DOS screen-readers (and, I presume,
those for the Windows environment, too) do not have sophisticated
facilities to analyze text and process it for sensible presentation to
the blind user (decolumnizing it, for example) in the way that OCR
scanning software often can. My thesis therefore was that the Acrobat
text viewer/translator would actually have to *display* the text in a
fashion logical for speech or Braille presentation. My question was
whether such alternative presentation would make sense visually as well.
As I say, the question may not even be relevant.
I am certain that you can rest assured that most blind computer users
will still be using DOS a year from now. For one thing, as I said before,
screen-review programs for the Windows platform aren't cheap. In
addition, all the hype of the vendors to the contrary notwithstanding, it
is not at all certain, in my opinion, that screen-review software for
Windows, Windows-95 and/or Windos-NT will improve sufficiently over the
next year to warrant massive purchasing for use on the job. Take a look
at the reviews of the various packages by NFB's International Braille and
Technology Center (I can forward you a copy if you like) and you'll see
how woefully inadequate the Windows access solutions are in comparison to
their DOS counterparts, despite the rather gentle treatment given most of
them. This is not to say that things won't improve significantly (though,
in my heart-of-hearts, I wonder); rather, it is to assure you that, in
the world of the blind computer-user, DOS will be around for some time to
come.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
-- Mike Freeman | Internet: mikef@pacifier.com GEnie: M.FREEMAN11 | Amateur Radio Callsign: K7UIJ /* PGP2.6.2 PUBLIC KEY available via finger or PGP key server */ ... Bureaucrats cut red tape -- lengthwise.
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