[thelist] 508 Compliant Screensavers
Laurel Nevans
laureln at qwestinternet.net
Fri May 27 21:37:13 CDT 2005
> I'll bet (know!) a screensaver designed for a totally sightless
> user could
> send a
> signal to a Braille output device to indicate when the
> screensaver was
> invoked.
> The monitor might still be needed for colleagues, though.
IIRC, that's what happened "in the early days". I think we set
the "marquis" screensaver, just b/c it had a text scroll that
would provide some kind of text output to the Braille device.
Most government workstations did NOT include speakers back then.
In fact, we used an "echo box" for the speech output. And nearby
co-workers would probably have been annoyed by a loud screen
saver that kicked in every time their co-worker was away from the
computer for too long. (they complained enough about how
distracting the echo box was anyway.) As to why the monitor is
on at all...remember, the majority of a blind person's
co-workers, supervisors, etc. are usually sighted, and they like
to know the worker is on task and not playing some Braille based
computer game. (so the colleagues comment is right-on there.)
Under 508, all workers must have "standard" workstations, which
is why we couldn't get rid of the mouse altogether, but rather
turned it upside-down and his it in some corner so the user would
stop hitting it accidentally.
Laurel
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