I am always amazed at these kinds of articles.  Granted I am glad that
they are getting the word out that the internet should be more accessible
and all.  That is a good thing.  However, I am always surprised to hear
how inaccessible the net is supposed to be.  Yeah, sure, some sites I find
annoying or clunky, but rare is the site that I cannot use at all.

I also find it a bit frustrating to read about low vision people
complaining about how difficult it is to use magnification yet refuse to
go to speech synth.  Synthetic speech is annoying to listen to at first,
but after a while it sounds perfectly normal.  And, it sounds like it
would be a lot faster.  I can't imagine that dragging your nose across the
screen with a dozen letters on the screen at once is easier or faster than
just using speech.

As a total aside here, I have gotten so used to the speech from my
MiniTransport, that it sounds nearly human to me at this point.  I have a
DecTalk Express at home, and I find that it sounds more synthetic and I
have to run it slower than my Transport.  Mainly because, I listen to my
transport for 8 to 10 hours a day at work, and my DecTalk only on
occasion.  Pretty amazing what you can get used to.

Oh well, hope I didn't offend anyone too much.  I just get tired of
hearing that I can't use most of the internet, when my experience hasn't
reflected that fact.


--
Blue skies.
Dan Rossi
Carnegie Mellon University.
E-Mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel:    (412) 268-9081


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html