LYNX-DEV Side scrolling, tables, and adaptive tech

[Al Gilman]

[Horizontal scrolling, by characters or by columns, for tables,
past 2.8]

I believe Judy Dixon told me that she runs her Windows screen in
two-point type so as to get the maximum amount of text within the
scope of navigation of her Braille screen reader.

Screen magnification and Braille interfaces are usually operating
in peephole mode already.  In that case I think it might be most
usable if we could convince the Ap [Lynx] and the terminal
emulation to ignore the limitations of any physical display
device and pretend that they are driving a very wide screen, at
least 132 or 255 characters wide.  Then the adaptive interface
would scroll this virtual text plane to select what region shows
through.

For speech output, the dynamics and preferences could well be
different.  But Lloyd sounded interested, so there is a good
chance that a highly usable mode could be defined.

Scott Luebking at Berkeley did some work with blind users and a
table browser that he wrote.  His browser did user-controlled
folding of the information plane.  First it decorated body
cells by surrounding them with copies of their relevant
header cell information, and then the user could select how
much of the result to have on the display plane or not.

Consider what you would get if you could interactively show/hide
rows and columns in a table.  That would get you a table
compressor that would pull up the view that you need.  This, of
course, is not a text interface.  It is a mini-spreadsheet.

-- Al Gilman