Hello Pascal, Daniel, and list, I am not a computer professional, having earned my living from physiotherapy and latterly, transcribing, but my experience may be relevant to Daniel's situation. I thought Pascal related the place of graphical interfaces very well. I came to the conclusion early on that we vision-impaired people who relate to computers via speech syntesis are far better off using text-based systems when available. If we use graphical interfaces, whether Daniel's UML diagrams or a gui desktop, we have to attempt to contstruct the graphical interface in our minds, attempt to input our needs into it, and then figure out the visual rules for manipulating it. This all involves wasted brain processing, as compared to a linear text interface. Put another way, speech synthesis is basically a one-dimensional modality, as are text-based modalities, whereas GUI tools are two-dimensional modalities which do not fit well with speech. I think many vision-impaired people ask the wrong question: they ask how can we emulate the methods of sighted people to do jobs, when a better question would be, how can we do that same job efficiently? All the above explains why I use emacspeak as first choice when presented with a problem. Rob Pascal J. Bourguignon writes: > plain text, us-ascii [Press RETURN to display text] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the emacspeak list or change your address on the emacspeak list send mail to "emacspeak-request@xxxxxxxxxxx" with a subject of "unsubscribe" or "help".
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