When people who are blind use a web browser, it doesn't
matter one iota whether there are graphics or not.  The access
technology does its best to deliver some kind of text interface
to the person using it.

        I wear two hats on our campus.  I am a UNIX system
administrator who runs our domain name servers plus looks after
our dhcp servers and many other UNIX-related activities.  I am
also a member of our Campus Committee for Accessibility and I
attend the meetings where we divide up the funds needed to provide
accessible student work stations, etc.

        It really makes me mad to have to spend the kind of money
we must spend on Windows-related systems.  In addition, Netscape
is the browser that is truly supported on campus while IE is
basically tolerated because it is the proverbial 900-pound
gorilla that can sleep anywhere it wants to.

        We must buy JAWS which doubles the cost of the work
station it is on.  This is all tax-payer and tuition money that
we are talking about and every time we have to build one of these
high-priced stations, that is probably one less station that we
could put somewhere else.

        From what I hear, the IBM home-page Reader sounds like a
real deal by comparison although I have never seen it in action.

        Of course, I would love to have a UNIX application that
was based on open-source software like lynx that would not choke
on most web sites.  There is nothing wrong if a site wants to
sell content, but we don't have anything at all if the core
functionality requires a marriage of a specific browser and a
very expensive screen reader in order to kind of work on a few
more web sites.

        People who are blind do not use a graphical browser so
much as they use a browser that was originally designed to work
in a graphical environment in such a way as to make it behave
like a text application.

        If we give up on even trying to make web sites work with
lynx or similarly-designed products, we are throwing out the last
vestige of common sense and entering a world which is more like a
measures/countermeasures game rather than a possibly solvable
problem.

        While this is a bit off the topic of what kind of browser
is best, the real answer, here, is one that works.  There is
nothing sacred about lynx except that it is open-source and does
not require any expensive support software to work.  This is the
model to strive for.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK
OSU Center for Computing and Information Services Data Communications Group