I will respond to the two comments I have seen on this
list so far because both are excellent and are right at the heart
of the issue.

Murali Penumarthy <[log in to unmask]> asks:
>   Thanks for your comments. However it is not clear to me how you
>   support your
>   visually challenged students in your Unix environment. I agree that IE
>   is 900
>   guerilla,  however it is the most prevailing operating system in the
>   web
>   world. What type of solutions are available in your environment?

        UNIX does not require quite the same kind of support that
Windows does.  The issues are different.  UNIX is built around a
few absolute concepts such as standard input and standard output
such that if one gets access to those, he or she has the keys to
the kingdom so to speak.  The challenge is to get those keys and
several strategies work.  One can take an old P.C. equipped with
a telecommunications application and a screen reader and use that
as a terminal in to the UNIX system either via a serial
communications line or via LAN technology such as Ethernet.

        Linux systems also have a number of screen readers that
reportedly work well and there is an application called emacspeak
that gets fabulous reviews from many quarters.  All of the screen
readers for UNIX and emacspeak are open-source and require only
the resources to run them and the patience to install them.

        The only beast in the jungle is X Windows which is the
UNIX graphical user interface.  It is actually a family of
graphical user interfaces and the reason why it is not really
accessible right now is that the problem is tremendous to solve.
Nobody is standing in the way or gouging money out of anybody.
It is just a tough problem.

        So, to answer that question, a student or faculty member
who is blind can use just about any old computer with a screen
reader and telecomm package that can behave on line like a VT100
terminal with addressable cursor and all.

Ann Parsons writes:

>However, what made me cheer so loudly is that you were not afraid to
>say the truth about the graphical screen readers.  What they do is
>convert graphics to a text based medium so it can be used by the
>blind.

        I appreciate your agreement because that always feels
better than flames, but I must clarify a bit.  The so-called
graphical browsers like netscape and IE do not convert graphics
in to text.  That would be truly a miracle if so.  Put in a
picture and get out one-thousand words that tell us what it is.

        Actually, what happens is that the screen reader and
browser combination end up throwing out all the non-text stuff
completely and possibly rearranging the order of any text
received so that it makes sense to hear or read in Braille.

        The images do absolutely nothing for us at all and there
is no magic software to convert them in to anything useful save
for print which can be treated via OCR.

        So, if one wrote an application in UNIX that could slurp
up the contents of one of today's Microsoft-driven graphical
monstrosities, ditch the graphics except for any alt tags, and
present the text and links in a form that we can handle from the
keyboard, that is all that needs to be done.

        What happened with lynx is that the rules for the game
changed to make it obsolete in its present form.

        The ideal solution would be a text-mode form of mozilla
or an engine in lynx that can wade through the chaos of
javascript and other access-breakers to ultimately produce what
we need.

        What we are only actually looking for is a user interface
between what we are good at doing and what the web site does.

Martin McCormick