[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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