“It was a personal goal of mine just to try to harvest all 28 species,” Mr. Duggan said. “Now 29.”

Rick Duggan tracking tule elk on the Twisselman ranch in California. He had a kill in all 28 classifications in the bow-hunting record book when a category for tule elk was created last year.

For years, 28 North American creatures — including the cougar, the musk ox and the grizzly bear — represented the list of targets recognized by the Pope and Young Club, the conservation organization and arbiter of bow-hunting records. Last summer, the club announced its first new category since 1993, the tule elk, a subspecies of Roosevelt elk found in a range tracing the San Andreas Fault through the Central Valley of California between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

So from August to December, elite hunters have descended on the tule range here in pursuit of a trophy elk. In the Owens Valley Region, home to one of the most well-established tule elk populations in the state, the number of applications to hunt early in the season nearly doubled to 566 in 2008 from 317 in 2007, said Joe Hobbs, the elk and pronghorn coordinator for the California Department of Fish and Game.

“That’s a pretty big jump,” Mr. Hobbs said. The number of applications to hunt later in the season, after the mating rituals in which male elk typically scar or break one another’s antlers, decreased by about 50 percent.

Tule elk (pronounced TOO-lee) grow to an average of 6 feet in length and 450 pounds. Mature bulls carry 40-pound racks of antlers in a backward sweep across their broad necks. They travel in herds of 20 or more, grazing on red brome, cheatgrass and wild licorice. When spooked, they can run 45 miles an hour.

Hunted to near extinction after the Gold Rush, the tule population was protected by California law until its number surpassed 2,000 in the 1980s. Then the state game commission began granting permits to outfitters. Despite the hunting, the population has grown to exceed 4,000 elk.

“We determined that we had enough entries of tule elk to merit a separate category,” said Glen Hisey, director of the records program for the club, which had previously accepted only two submissions of photographs and documentation for tule elk, classifying them instead as Roosevelt elk.

At a national convention in April, after officials have verified antler measurements and other entry requirements, the club will declare a world record tule elk, affording its hunter some measure of renown. But for now, the listing for the new category reads, “No Official Record Yet.”

To merit inclusion in the Pope and Young record book, bow hunters must comply with an ethical code known as Fair Chase. Its rules prohibit taking any animal helpless in a trap, deep snow or water. The code also bans shooting at animals from powered vehicles and boats, night lights, tranquilizers, poisons, herding and some electronic devices.

For many bow hunters, the appeal of the sport lies in the intimacy of stalking for a close-range shot.

“That’s the advantage of bow hunting,” said Jack Frost, a surgeon from Anchorage who hunts in his spare time. “You’re forced by the equipment you’ve chosen to spend more time with the animal.”

Before the creation of the new tule elk category, a hunter named Chuck Adams gained fame in 1990 as the first to kill a member of every classification endorsed by Pope and Young at the time. Mr. Adams achieved his feat, dubbed the North American Super Slam, with a compound bow, a weapon with pulleys and cables granting a range of 60 yards or more.

Among traditional hunters, a friendly competition developed to recreate the Super Slam without the aid of modern engineering. By the early part of this decade, Mr. Duggan, a residential contractor from near Denver, was locked in a race with Fred Eichler, the host of a televised bow-hunting program. In April 2006, after 35 days outside Hermosillo, Mexico, Mr. Duggan completed the feat by killing a desert sheep. Mr. Eichler soon matched him with a kill in all 28 categories.

Finding no success on his summer tule elk hunt, Mr. Duggan returned here last month to the Central Valley for a weeklong expedition. At 54, with a burly build and a steady manner, he estimated he had spent $400,000 in pursuit of his first 28 animals.

Far into the molded foothills still lush despite winter’s first seduction, past silos and stables and a road called Trails End and down a dirt path marked with an antlered skull, Duggan found Nolan Twisselman. Mr. Twisselman, 44, is a rancher whose 80,000 acres, a property that has been in his family for generations, entitled him to buy tags for 12 tule cows and 7 bulls. Across San Luis Obispo County, his neighbors were bringing solar power companies onto the land. To supplement his income, Twisselman, 44, had sold all but one of his tags to hunters, holding the last in reserve for his mother.

As a low roll of threatening clouds hunched over the faraway hills one morning, the men set out across trails of mud on all-terrain vehicles, scanning the horizon for a herd of 22 bulls they had been tracking. After months spent fighting and breeding, the bulls were traveling now in seasonal fellowship.

“There they are,” Mr. Twisselman said, training binoculars on a distant clearing where a handful of elk stood inside a backstop of interlocking hills.

The men sat and watched. In time Mr. Duggan took bow in hand and climbed the far side of the northernmost hill. He moved upward in silence, knowing that an unexpected sound could send his prey fleeing into the mountains forested with junipers.

And then they came into view: Arrayed across a quiet valley was a whole herd, an austere group of magnificent beasts with Chicago shoulders, long necks and proud antlers.

He dropped into a ditch three feet deep by four feet wide. An hour passed. The elk ambled farther into the clearing, away from his position, around the belly of the southernmost hill and out of sight.

In five days of hunting, Mr. Duggan would fire only once, on the run at 30 yards distance, missing entirely. Twice more he would prowl within 40 yards of the herd, once in a blinding snowstorm, holding back for fear of maiming his prey.

By the end of the year, the bookkeepers at Pope and Young had accepted 22 entries, most shot with compound bows. The largest tule elk, scored at 312 5/8 points, was still the one shot by Audrey Goodnight in 1990, the oldest on record.

“We’d been treating it as a Roosevelt all these years,” said Mr. Hisey, the records program director.

But for now, as the rain turned to sleet, Mr. Duggan tracked the bulls across the plain toward distant foothills. He crouched beside a fencepost for hours. Not 50 yards away, the elk grazed, bedded, considered him. Then, on some unseen signal, the herd roamed away in the dying light. He left wet and tired and empty-handed.

That passion didn’t change after glaucoma took his eyesight at the age of 14. What changed is the role that technology — and his own innovations — played in helping him pursue his interests.

T. V. Raman of Google is a pioneer in customizing technology for blind users. His own PC reads text aloud at triple normal speed.

A native of India, Mr. Raman went from relying on volunteers to read him textbooks at a top technical university there to leading a largely autonomous life in Silicon Valley, where he is a highly respected computer scientist and an engineer at Google.

Along the way, Mr. Raman built a series of tools to help him take advantage of objects or technologies that were not designed with blind users in mind. They ranged from a Rubik’s Cube covered in Braille to a software program that can take complex mathematical formulas and read them aloud, which became the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation at Cornell. He also built a version of Google’s search service tailored for blind users.

Mr. Raman, 43, is now working to modify the latest technological gadget that he says could make life easier for blind people: a touch-screen phone.

“What Raman does is amazing,” said Paul Schroeder, vice president for programs and policy at the American Foundation for the Blind, which conducts research on technology that can help visually impaired people. “He is a leading thinker on accessibility issues, and his capacity to design and alter technology to meet his needs is unique.”

Some of Mr. Raman’s innovations may help make electronic gadgets and Web services more user-friendly for everyone. Instead of asking how something should work if a person cannot see, he says he prefers to ask, “How should something work when the user is not looking at the screen?”

Such systems could prove useful for drivers or anyone else who could benefit from eyes-free access to a phone. They could also appeal to aging baby boomers with fading vision who want to keep using technology they’ve come to depend on.

Mr. Raman’s approach reflects a recognition that many innovations designed primarily for people with disabilities have benefited the broader public, said Larry Goldberg, who oversees the National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH, the public broadcasting station in Boston. They include curb cuts for wheelchairs, captions for television broadcasts and optical character-recognition technology, which was fine-tuned to create software that could read printed books aloud and is now used in many computer applications, he said.

With no buttons to guide the fingers on its glassy surface, the touch-screen cellphone may seem a particularly daunting challenge. But Mr. Raman said that with the right tweaks, touch-screen phones — many of which already come equipped with GPS technology and a compass — could help blind people navigate the world.

“How much of a leap of faith does it take for you to realize that your phone could say, ‘Walk straight and within 200 feet you’ll get to the intersection of X and Y,’ ” Mr. Raman said. “This is entirely doable.”

ADVOCATES for the blind have long complained that technology companies have done a generally poor job of making their products accessible. The Web, while opening many opportunities for blind people, is still riddled with obstacles. And sophisticated screen-reader software, which turns documents and Web pages into synthesized speech, can cost more than $1,000. Even with a screen reader, many sites are hard to navigate.

Last year, the National Federation of the Blind reached a settlement of a landmark class-action lawsuit against one company whose site advocates found unusable, Target. In the settlement, the retailer agreed to make its Web site accessible to blind people. The federation assesses the usability of Web sites and currently certifies only a handful as being fully accessible.

One challenge is that technology often evolves much faster than the guidelines that ensure Web sites work well with screen readers. In December, the World Wide Web Consortium, an Internet standards group, released Version 2.0 of its accessibility guidelines for Web sites. The previous version dated back to 1999, when the Web consisted largely of static Web pages rather than interactive applications.  Obstacles on the Web take many forms. A common one is the Captcha, a security feature consisting of a string of distorted letters and numbers that users are supposed to read and retype before they register for a new service or send e-mail. Few Web sites offer audio Captchas.

Some pages are just poorly designed, like e-commerce sites where the “checkout” button is an image that isn’t labeled so screen readers can find it.

“The overwhelming percentage of the industry really hasn’t stepped up to the plate to provide the blindness community with equal access to their products,” said Eric Bridges, director of advocacy and governmental affairs at the American Council of the Blind. Mr. Bridges and other advocates argue that accessibility should be built into new technologies, not added as an afterthought.

People with other disabilities face similar challenges on the Internet. “On the deafness side, the frustration is huge because of all of the video out there without captions,” Mr. Goldberg said.

MR. RAMAN, who before joining Google in 2005 worked at Adobe Systems and as a researcher at I.B.M., is intimately familiar with accessibility problems, both personally and professionally. In 2006, he developed a version of Google’s search engine that gives a slight preference to Web sites that work well with screen readers. The system had to test millions of Web pages.

“You wouldn’t have found a single page that fully complied with the accessibility guidelines,” Mr. Raman said. Still, the system could detect which pages worked reasonably well with screen readers.

The service is not being used as widely as he had hoped. Still, it has had an impact. Several Web site operators whose sites weren’t showing up prominently in Google search results asked Mr. Raman how they could fix their sites so they would rank better.

The service includes a screen magnifier that enlarges individual search results. Mr. Raman says the feature is intended to help low-vision users, but it could also prove useful to a much larger population, especially on cellphones and other devices with small screens.

For his own use, he has built a highly customized system that allows him efficient access to much of what he needs on his PC and on the Web, stripping out anything that could slow him down. For instance, the system goes directly to the article text on the news sites he reads regularly, bypassing navigational links and other features found on most Web pages.

On a recent day, Mr. Raman was working on a research paper about the future structure of the Web. A monitor hung above the desk. It is usually turned off, unless he wants to show a colleague or visitor what he is working on. He typed at his keyboard, his head slightly tilted to one side, listening to his screen reader through a pair of wireless headphones.

The screen reader is calibrated to speak at roughly triple the speed of a normal voice. To the untrained ear, the output is incomprehensible, but it allows Mr. Raman to “read” at roughly the same speed as a sighted person.

Processing information quickly is a skill he has developed over the years: a video on YouTube shows him solving his Braille Rubik’s Cube in 23 seconds. When he is not typing, Mr. Raman, who wears large sunglasses, is often folding and unfolding pieces of paper into tiny, origami-like geometrical shapes at prodigious speed.

He shares a work area at Google with Charles Chen, a 25-year-old engineer, and Hubbell, Mr. Raman’s guide dog. (Hubbell has his own Web site.)

Mr. Chen, who is sighted, developed a free screen reader for Web pages that works with the Firefox browser. Working together, the two recently added keyboard shortcuts that help blind and low-vision users navigate quickly through Google’s search results. They’ve also developed tools to make sophisticated Web applications, like e-mail and blog readers, suitable for screen-reading software.

Now, much of their effort is focused on touch-screen phones.

“The thing I am most interested in is all of the stuff moving to the mobile world, because it is a big life-changer,” Mr. Raman said.

To show their progress, Mr. Raman pulled his T-Mobile G1, a touch-screen phone with Google’s Android software, from a pocket of his jeans. He and Mr. Chen have already outfitted it with software that speaks much like a screen reader on a PC. Now they are working on ways to allow blind people, or anyone who is not looking at the screen, to enter text, numbers and commands.

That development would complement voice-recognition systems, which are not always reliable and don’t work well in noisy environments. Since he cannot precisely hit a button on a touch screen, Mr. Raman created a dialer that works based on relative positions. It interprets any place where he first touches the screen as a 5, the center of a regular telephone dial pad. To dial any other number, he simply slides his finger in its direction — up and to the left for 1, down and to the right for 9, and so on. If he makes a mistake, he can erase a digit simply by shaking the phone, which can detect motion.

He and Mr. Chen are testing several other input methods. None of these technologies have been rolled out, but Mr. Raman, who is already using the G1 as his primary cellphone, hopes to make them freely available soon.

(Few screen readers are available for smartphones today, and they can often cost as much as a phone itself.)

What may become the most life-changing mobile technology — a phone that can recognize and read signs through its camera — may still be a few years away, Mr. Raman said. Already, some devices can read text this way. But because blind users don’t know where signs are, they can’t point the camera at them or align it properly, Mr. Raman said. Once chips become powerful enough, they will be able to detect a sign’s location and read skewed type, he said.

“Those things will happen,” he said. When they do, sighted users will benefit, too.

“If you have the technology that can recognize a street sign as you drive by it, that is helpful for everyone,” he said. “In a foreign country, it will translate it.”

Mr. Raman’s innovations have already made their way onto millions of PCs. At Adobe in the 1990s, he helped to adapt the PDF format so it could be read by screen readers. That was required for PDF to be used by the federal government, and it eventually led to the technology’s being embraced as a global standard for electronic documents.

“It was incredibly important to us as a business, and to the blind,” said John Warnock, the chairman and founder of Adobe.

Mr. Raman says he thinks he has the largest impact when he can persuade other engineers to make their products accessible — or, better yet, when he can convince them that there are interesting problems to be solved in this area. “If I can get another 10 engineers motivated to work on accessibility,” he said, “it is a huge win.”