Hi,

I am writing a paper on Web accessibility. As a someone that only
has slightly bad eye sight (wearing glasses) I don't know how the
current tools (braille terminals, speech systems and user agents
intended for blind users) are. I would like some help regarding the
problems they solve and/or cause.

Some concrete questions:

How good are screen readers and do they understand any semantical
information. For example if a web page uses tables to visually
layout the information will the reader still (as I have come to
understand how they work anyway) read the words on that line from
one side of the screen to the other or do they 'understand' that
the table cell on the left might a column separate from the right?

Is a braille terminal effective way to access information?

Is a keyboard necessary to have two way communication or some other
means preferable?

In an interview with T.V. Raman (blind researcher who wrote the
EmacsSpeak extension to the Emacs editor) it was said the speech
output he got from his computer was highly accelerated making it
hard to impossible for an untrained listener to comprehend. Is
efficiency a problem with current speech systems?

Do the specialized user agents (commonly named web-browsers) solve
problems that screen readers have? If so how good are they?


Further since I am a software engineer I am also interested in how
current tools (especially user agents) could be improved. I understand
aural cues may be a way to signal the start or end of a semantical
object like a header or a table, but are there any better ways to do
this? How would a effecient way be to present tabular data to a blind
user, for example?

If anyone feel inclined to answer you can do it directly to me if it
isn't customary to send replies to the list.

Thanks in advance for any help I get on these issues.

 /Olof

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