AUI keeps a visual display on the monitor. It's a visible echo of some of the spoken information. It's very simple, very large, very bold, and very high contrast.
This illustration was built in the Text Editor activity. The white space at the top is used for displaying data input by the user. The colored bars at the bottom are the visual representation of the menu. They rotate as the menu cells change — a low-vision user can use the colors to help navigate the menu.
The display can be set, in the Preferences activity, to use black and white or black and yellow, standard or reverse video. These examples are using black letters on a white background.
Preferences can also set the font face and the minimum font size to use in the display, and when AUI starts up, it checks the size of the display and optimizes the display for those settings. Here's what my own monitor looks like using the Mac's Optima font at a minimum of 200 points.
A keyboard is also available — it started as a tool to be used by VI, but it's evolved into a tool that can be useful to anyone: total, low-vision, or sighted.
AUI's keyboard is a little different from the standard computer keyboard:
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Whenever an AUI character key is pressed or released (function keys, for example, are ignored), AUI generates a 'click' sound. The click doesn't happen unless the computer recognizes the key — bumping the keyboard won't make a mess on the screen.
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Holding a key down doesn't repeat — every character entered is a separate keystroke.
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Preferences allow it to be set to operate in any of three modes:
Single stroke, quiet — For a touch typist of any persuasion, it can be set to act like a plain old keyboard, except that there are always sound effects of keys being pressed and released.
Single stroke, talking — The keyboard can be set to speak the name of a key as it's entered.
Two stroke, talking — And it can be set to speak the name, but not enter the key until it's pressed twice in a row. In this mode, a user can try different keys until the right one is found, then press it again to enter the letter and always be sure of which letter will be entered before it is actually entered. It's not real fast in that mode, but if your fingers are a little off, you'll know about it before the wrong character is added to your work.