X and NeWS history
I&#x27;ve read some of Don Hopkins&#x27; comments about all the cool things that were done with PostScript running in the NeWS server. I wonder, if NeWS had survived long enough that Sun had to add accessibility for people with disabilities (to sell to governments and schools if nothing else), how would they have done it? Today, the current state of the art is very chatty IPC (meaning tens of microseconds per cross-process call), partially assisted by bulk fetching and caching. To appreciate how bad that can be, think about a screen reader making at least one IPC call per word when reading text, to ask the application about word boundaries and bounding rectangles. That&#x27;s a problem I hope to solve someday. In a parallel universe, though, maybe the screen reader is running inside the NeWS server, in the same address space as a PostScript-based UI toolkit.