fastfinge 2 points 6y ago
The thing about command line is that there are just so many commands to remember! Even if you're blind, a visual interface can still be helpful. If you forget how to perform a particular function, you can just go hunting through the menus and dialogues of the application until you find it. On the command line, there's no similar way to discover (or rediscover) functionality. Also, most web apps these days (Reddit, Facebook, etc, etc) are designed visually. So they're really clunky to use in a command line browser. Plus, they require blind people to understand the visual paradigm anyway. So if we have to use GUIs no matter what, we might as well just use them all the time.
I do use Linux as a server OS, of course. But I don't find I'm any faster on the command line than I am in a gui. And when I used Windows Server 2003, I found the GUI made all my problems easier to solve, because it was just easier to find everything.
One thing I personally want, though I doubt any other blind person wants this, is an accessible bitcoin wallet. Right now I'm forced to use web wallets because everything that runs locally has almost no screen reader support. This could probably be fixed without starting from scratch, though. The problem is that the population of blind people is so small, it seems likely that I might be the only blind person using Bitcoin. So the odds of fixes happening are vanishingly small. Similarly, I don't expect we'll get an accessible hardware wallet for at least 10 years.
Vaelian 1 points 6y ago
It's very easy to think that text consoles might be easier for the blind than graphical user interfaces, but it is actually the opposite. In a text console everything is plain text no matter how fancy your curses UI looks, it's all visual without any kind of structure, so the screen-reader can't make heads or tails of the interface like it can on a graphical user interface. Personally I avoid console-based curses applications such as text editors because their output is extremely confusing and causes glitches on VoiceOver.