Hi Bill,
I don't plan on starting a philosophical discussion here, but just some thoughts. At least here in the US, speech is more commonly used simply because of the cost of Braille displays. Luckily, I do have access to Braille and speech, but I cannot use both at the same time because both, at least for hardware speech, require the use of the serial port. Although I use Braille as my primary medium for reading books, speech is better if you need access to lots of material in a hury since with the current Braille displays you can only access one line of Braille at a time. However,we cannot forget about Braille access for those of us who use Braille and especially for those of us who happen to be deaf-blind and need Braille as their primary access method. I guess a very bad analogy would be that when sighted people find that their computer automatically detects their mouse as an input device, it also detects a track ball if one exists. As I said before, using one accessibility solution should not break another.<smile>