54cb86f7   
   872264db   
   From: ohland@charter.net   
      
   https://knowbility.org/blog/2023/accessibility-apis-part-2   
      
   " When Screen Readers Got GUI   
      
   Screen readers have never literally read the screen, of course. Only   
   something on your side of the thirteen-inch amber CRT monitor could do   
   that. However, as the earliest screen readers emerged during the   
   mid-1980s, such as Textalker for the Apple II and Jim Thatcher's   
   in-house IBM screen reader, they did read video memory, which consisted   
   of a couple of easily-accessed kilobytes of values representing text   
   characters (i.e., the ASCII standard), plus additional memory addresses   
   that stored color values, once that became a thing. A twelve-year-old   
   could read and write to it: I was, and I did during the early '80s.   
   Screen readers' tasks all revolved around this simple UI. They echoed   
   typed text, automatically read lines scrolling up from the bottom,   
   automatically announced text with a specific background color that   
   designated a selected menu item, provided a special review mode and   
   review cursor that could explore the entire screen, sent their output   
   text string to a hardware speech synthesizer, and granted the user   
   control over all of it through more buttons and switches than a NASA   
   manned space vehicle. When a program switched into "graphics mode" in   
   order to draw the screen as a "bitmap" pixel by pixel, screen readers   
   clammed up."   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)