The Importance of Being Text

I appreciate the clean look of BYTE's World Wide Web pages. I am also glad they're compatible with my browser, Lynx. I and other blind computer users are fearful that text information on the Web will suffer with the advent of interactive graphics, Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), and Java. Access to the Windows environment has been difficult until lately, and the graphical Web could also prove difficult for the blind to manage. The greatest problems with Windows and other GUIs are nonstandard icons and buttons that are not clearly labeled with text. These are still problem areas for makers of screen-reading packages for Windows 3.1; even Microsoft chooses not to follow its own standards for some applications.

Bob Logue
boblogue@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca

We're working on alternate E-mail interfaces to our Web-based services because we realize that not everyone has convenient access to the Web. But the concerns you raise make our effort even more important. Thanks for the feedback.--Jon Udell, executive editor z