59. Hardships in Facilitating Graphical User Interfaces

Although a wide range of accommodation products is readily available, there are still areas of unmet need where accessibility cannot be readily achieved. Technology is its own enemy when universal design principles are not factored in. Hopefully technology advances will meet these needs in the near future, but manufacturers of adaptive technologies are struggling to keep up with constant evolutionary changes.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, software application programmers began designing more sophisticated screen layouts. The human user interface received a facelift with the birth of pull down menus, colored tool bars and special cursors. These features provided convenient functionality for many, but were not accessible by users of adaptive technologies.

Fortunately, programmers have been able to overcome these barriers by modifying existing products to be compatible with these screen innovations. However, the advent of the graphical user interface (GUI) in the late 1980s posed a very strong challenge and threat to computer accessibility. At the time, many assumed there was no solution to this problem.

People who could not see the screen were not going to be able to access these new interfaces because the graphics screen could not be read by a screen reader of Braille system. Fortunately, these fears have not been realized. Currently, advanced technologies are starting to produce speech systems that can translate graphics screen information into an accessible form. But unfortunately, they are having very limited success at the current moment.