Re: Lynx

[Lloyd G. Rasmussen]

On Tue, 9 Dec 1997 19:17:51 -0330 (NST), 
Andrew Vardy   <address@hidden> wrote:

>Hi Lloyd,
>
>I have a question.  What is it with having Lynx for IBM?  Why was that
>created?  IBM users already have a browser.  Netscape.  And so on.  Why
>create Lynx for IBM?
>
>Isn't Lynx a rather large program?  And only on Unix is it connected to
>the Internet directly.  Why did anyone go through the trouble of rewriting
>Lynx for IBM?  Seems a lot of work, and for no point.
>
>I mean doesn't 90% of the world use Netscape anyway?
>
>I am merely curious.
>

I hope you are asking me a serious question.  I got into using Lynx, 
first under Unix, because I am blind and operate my computers with the 
help of screen reading programs which intercept information coming 
from the keyboard and the screen and send them to a text-to-speech 
synthesizer so that I can hear this information.  There is at least a 
two-year lag between when a new operating system or major program is
released and when someone has figured out a way to send enough of its 
output to speech or to a one-line braille display so that a blind 
person can use it.  This time lag is shortening, but it is still 
there, especially for the more graphical programs.

I now use screen reading programs in both DOS and Windows, and 
frequently use both Lynx and Internet Explorer.  I have also used 
Netscape 2.0.  If I need access to streaming audio, or want a 
nice-looking printout for my sighted cowerkers, or want to get into a 
site that discriminates against Lynx, I will use the Windows 
browsers.  But if I want information from web pages, including search 
engines, Lynx is much, much more efficient.  It gives the right 
information at the right time.  Its design has had considerable input 
from blind users.  For me, using the web is for finding information, 
and information is a scarce commodity if you cannot read print.

The DOS port of Lynx does connect to the internet, either through a 
packet driver or PPP.  I find it loads pages from local files at least 
ten times faster than the Windows browsers when running on a Pentium 
computer with 16 megs of RAM.  

We need a DOS version of Lynx because Unix shell accounts are becoming 
less commonly available than PPP connections.  Lynx will, if people 
continue to voluntarily work on it, be of great help in the developing 
nations where computer access is minimal.  We don't know what its 
future holds, because there is no funding to hire programmers to help 
it keep up with the ever-changing web standards.  But at the moment it 
meets a real need for tens of thousands of real computer users.


-- 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