Category: Geeks r Us
Please consider this video with bill gates.
http://www.pcworld.com/video/id,519-page,1-bid,0/video.html
If the future is totally touch screen, can us blind folk keep up?
Sorry, let me make that in to a link.
bill gates new push for the future
People said the same thing about windows, there'll be a way given time, the mony is there to be made.
As long as the U.S. government sticks to its internal regulations of purchasing only the most accessible technology in any given sector (and for MS alone this business is worth billions of dollars annually) MS, or any other company that wants its technology to be used in the public sector, will find a way to make its technology accessible. And it's a good thing. I don't think evlution of electronics should be halted because of accessibility fears, I'd prefer it if the accessibility solutions evolved with the products and interfaces. The blind community must be careful to both keep the legal pressure to insure that their needs are represented and meeting them has financial insentives and also to provide talented and innovative programmers and IT people and engineers to come up with ideas for new approaches.
The simple slution to the computer of the future e.g. woul be simply to have a usb slot for the interface so that good old fashioned computer keyboard could be plugged in, but a better and/or more modern approach might involve voice recognition or some even more drastic way of controlling the unit in question.
Cheers
-B