blindness and top vs. bottom posting (was "all ip addresses of machines in the local network")

[Tim Chase]

> I am a member of another list that has at least one member
> who has lost his vision, and reads his news with a speech
> generator.  It is terribly inconvenient for him to follow
> a thread full of 'bottom postings', as he is then forced to
> sit through the previous message contents again and again
> in search of the new content.  

I'm involved on the Blind Linux users (Blinux) list, and they 
seem to have no problem bottom-posting.

There are a variety of tools for converting bottom-posting into 
more readable formats.  If you want to suppress comments, a 
quality MUA can suppress them.  Or you can pipe them through 
sed/grep/whatever and strip out all lines beginning with a 
greater-than sign.  Or, use the search functionality in the 
screen-reader to skip ahead to the next line until you get to one 
  that doesn't begin with a greater-than sign.  Some text-display 
areas even allow you to use searching to move the cursor.  E.g. 
if reading a mail in mutt in a console, you can open it in vim 
and search for "^[^>]" which will move the cursor to the next 
line that doesn't begin with a greater-than sign.  Quite usable 
from within yasr ("yet another screen reader").

Inspired by a problem discussed on the Blinux list, I've also 
created a python tool for converting standard quoting notation 
(using greater-than signs) into a more TTS-friendly 
(text-to-speech) format:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/blinux-list/2006-June/msg00012.html
http://www.redhat.com/archives/blinux-list/2006-June/msg00015.html
http://www.redhat.com/archives/blinux-list/2006-June/msg00016.html

Thus, there are tools for blind/visually-impared folks that can 
make it easier for them to correspond using the standards the 
rest of the world uses.  Even among blind users, there's often a 
division between those that use Braille terminals and those that 
use TTS.  Those using Braille tend to fall in with the rest of 
the internet, preferring bottom-posting.  Those using TTS aren't 
quite so fond of having their own content regurgitated back to 
them.  However, judicial pruning of quoted contend can ease that 
problem.

Thus, there are plenty of tools to help BVI folks operate under 
the standard of bottom-posting.

-tkc