hello,

when being critical of something i always try to provide a solution.
before going to it, there are a few observations about the views of
others.  i have had the experience of thinking about and designing
interfaces in various computer situations and thus have some perspective
about what is an effective interface.  working alone is not a measure of
effectivness, there can be 10 versions all which work but some which are
much better then others.  the nls interface is not a good interface.  all
the suggestions many people have made require making changes to adapt to
it rather then the interface being flexable enough to be adapted to the
needs of blind folk.  the old interface was simple and effective and
required no such adaptation.  they could have easily kept that approach
and hooked it into the faster search engine they now have, while offering
the new exhaustive item version for those who might need it.  better yet
would be an approach where individualized versions could be set up once
and saved as a bookmark.

i have looked at the html coding of both the old and new versions.  there
is no rocket science here, all are standard form setups.  the latter just
has an exhaustive list of all possible combinations crambed into one form.
after some major surjery, i tossed 95 percent of the new form which now
looks and works like the older version and fits on one screen, rather then
13. it contains only the search variables i want to use and were available
on the old version.  i should amend the latter by saying they now have a
global item which looks at all the information categories, this is useful
and was not in the old form.  i can now put this file on my system and use
it in place of the new librarian gone mad version.  after looking at and
seeing the simple setup, an nls web page person could make several simple
versions before lunch, and not even break a sweat.  when you design a
horse by committee without input from horse users, you get a camel.  when
you design a database interface by committee without real world blind user
input, you get the nls interface.  if someone might be interested in a
simpler version, send me an email message.

regards,

dan


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