Re: LYNX-DEV Studies of the users of the lynx-browser

[Lloyd G. Rasmussen]

On 20 May 97 11:29:25 EDT, 
Andreas Schmitz   <address@hidden> wrote:

>I'm writing an article on "blind people using internet". I am sure the
>lynx-browser as an purely textbased browser is the most efficient for blind
>people.
>Unfortunately, I didn't find any studies on how often the browser is used and 
>by
>whom: If you have special information on the users of the lynx browser please
>send it by mail.

Off the top of my head, I'd say there are a few thousand blind people 
who use Lynx.  I wish it was more, and it might be, but nobody really 
knows.  Not everyone who has an adapted computer also has a modem and 
can figure out how to use it.  Not everyone is willing to put up with 
the way some of the text may be repeated as you move from link to link 
with a speech synthesizer turned on and *all* of the BIOS output from 
the telecommunications program is spoken.  Not everybody is motivated 
to learn about the most useful information technology since the 
invention of Braille or optical character recognition.

Lynx was the first game in town, but it is not the only one anymore.  
PW Webspeak is a talking Windows 3.1 program which directly interprets 
the HTML to a speech synthesizer without a screen reading program 
getting in the way.  
www.prodworks.com

Screen readers are now on the market for Windows 3.1 and 95.  They can 
interpret the text that a web browser has put on the screen, and can 
also recognize some of the controls like check boxes, option lists and 
submit buttons.  Frames are problematic.  Alt text is as necessary as 
it ever was.  But if you want to read a bus schedule from a table, it 
is much better than Lynx.  I would say that hundreds of blind people 
are using versions of Netscape or Internet Explorer for at least some 
of their browsing. There are people who would say that my 
numbers are too low for both Lynx and graphical browser use. 

I would agree with you, though, that Lynx provides the best overall 
access to text on a platform that mere mortals can use.

Hope this helps.


-- Lloyd Rasmussen
Senior Staff Engineer, Engineering Section
National Library Service for the  Blind and Physically Handicapped
Library of Congress          202-707-0535
(work)       address@hidden    www.loc.gov/nls/
(home) address@hidden

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