And as usual, who is asking our opinions. I mean everyone's opinions not
just blind folks. Blind people aren't the only group unhappy about the
removal of anything resembling a button.


-----Original Message-----
From: Visually Impaired Computer Users' Group List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of ted chittenden
Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2013 1:47 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [VICUG-L] NPR.org Text-Only : The End Of Buttons: The New
Gesture-Control Era

Hi to all.

While the story below is for a general audience, its implications for blind
accessibility aren't hard to miss. In a nutshell, if you're like me and use
a desktop system with a QWERTY keyboard, you're ancient history. If you use
a Blackberry with lots of buttons, you're passé (I'm not sure how to do that
accented e). But if you're an Apple user using hand gestures or if you use
DragonSpeak with voice commands, welcome to the future!

And yes, an audio version of this story is available at the link below.
--
Ted Chittenden

Every story has at least two sides if not more.
----
http://thin.npr.org/s.php?sId=213469564&rId=2&x=1

By Elise Hu

All Things Considered, August 19, 2013 · Last week, BlackBerry put up a
for-sale sign after many years of decline. The once revolutionary BlackBerry
was the first smartphone addiction for so many Americans — you were
connected all the time! — and even when iPhone ushered in a slimmer,
sleeker, faster era, a few holdouts (many on Capitol Hill) continued to
stubbornly keep a BlackBerry in their pockets.

But looking back, it's clear BlackBerry devices began to lose consumers more
than half a decade ago. That's when the iPhone's touch screen became the
user interface de rigueur and the Blackberry, with its keyboard and buttons,
became almost instantly outdated. Hemispheres Magazine takes note:




"Computers, which started as banks of switches, sprouted keyboards (banks of
buttons with letters on them). We used buttons to select television shows to
watch and pushed buttons to order soft drinks from vending machines. Then
came the BlackBerry, which bristled with buttons.

"And then, with the iPhone, everything changed. As a descendant of both the
computer and the phone, Apple's superproduct had a big button at the bottom,
plus a switch at the top and some tiny little controls. You could even argue
that the entire screen is a button of sorts. The point, though, is that we
didn't need to rely on just buttons anymore; we could tap, drag and pinch to
operate the phone. The moment Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld 2007 and
brandished his nifty little device, the button was on notice. Fingers, with
touchscreens, became the new buttons."



So it goes with technology. The switch gave way to the button, the button
gave way to a touch screen, and soon, touching screens may seem old-school:
Gesture and voice control are the "waves" of the future.

The newest smartphones are abandoning both physical and on-screen buttons in
favor of gestures. "[S]crolling, swiping, tapping, pinching, flicking — are
becoming the dominant form of the smartphone user interface," writes Rani
Molla for technology site GigaOM.

As with so much behavior change ushered in by technology, the change happens
before we take wider notice. But in cars, those physical buttons have been
disappearing; gaming turned to wave commands with Xbox Kinect years ago; and
button-cluttered remote controls are giving way to smartphone controls.
Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows 8, is flat and without button
icons to click. Google Glass, the revolutionary spectacle-computer, is
largely controlled with voice commands. And with each new phone, like the
Moto X, the range of gesture commands to interface with it is increasing.

This creates challenges for user interface designers, who still have a ways
to go to understand which gesture commands are likely to be both precise and
natural enough for wide user adoption. Reviews for Leap Motion, a new device
that turns gestures into digital commands, have been mixed. But the
technological shift is afoot. Already, buttons seem passé


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