To pick up on mark's Linux thread, this was posted to the Linux access
list by the developer of the only screen reader for this operating
system, T. V. ramon.

kelly

From: T. V. Raman <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]

the disease goes much deeper.

In the last few years many so called "accessibility
professionals" have laughed openly in talking about linux in
general and systems like emacspeak in particular with the
statement "that stuff is irrelevant to a student" and "a
student needs to use MS word if he/she needs to find a job"

Personally,  I dont think I'd want a job where using Word
was considered a "skill"-- students ought to be learning to
write rather than learning to use a word processor.
This malady has gone so deep in the field of
training of visually impaired users that at this point the
average student with a visual impairment probably spends
more (most) of his/her time learning tools that were never
designed to be used in a non-visual setting
and consequently spends far less time learning/studying the
actual material.

What's worse is that in the rush to do this, these students
are also probably being cheated out of the opportunity to
learn the things they are supposed to be learning.

This is not to say that students should come out being
totally ignorant of environments that their visually able
colleagues will be using--
but unless the student has the ability to
differentiate between the tool e.g. the word processor and
the task e.g. writing a quality document
we'll always have visually impaired users starting on the
backfoot when it comes to competing in the mainstream.

Above anything else every visually impaired user needs to
be able to make an educated decision about the tools he/she
wishes to use to overcome a particular problem-- and this
goes well beyond picking computer aids,
it starts right from the time one chooses a human reader to
read out material, a writer to write an exam while at
school,
and so on.

Ben Van Poppel writes:
 > Oddly enough, that's exactly what I got told when I approached the
 > Institute for the Blind in Victoria about using Linux. I basically got
 > the presponse that I'd be best off using a DOS terminal and that Unix was
 > old and nearly dead so why would I want to use it anyway? Now that I've
 > started working with Linux productively using Emacspeak, I'm so glad I
 > decided to take the jump and start the process of ditching Windows. The
 > problem is that Windows is what gets dictated to all new blind computer
 > users, and they get impatient with anything else. The difference with me
 > was they started me off with DOS and I couldn't come at the GUI so Linux
 > was a tempting alternative. What would be some ways to try and promote
 > Linux in the blind community? I'm sure a lot more blinkies would use it,
 > but a lot of them simply don't know it exists because they have sighted
 > teachers, techos, visiting teachers etc who inundate them with Windows.
 >
 > Regards
 > Ben.
 >
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--
Best Regards,
--raman

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