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Apple to Add Free Screen Reader to Mac OS X
Joe Clark writes "Screen readers for blind Mac users have been nonexistent since 2003 when development was halted on the only one in existence. On Windows they cost up to $1,295. This week, Apple announced the upcoming Spoken Interface for Mac OS X, the long-rumoured Apple screen reader and more, we are told. Apple is looking for beta-testers for this technology preview. Already, a developer muses that IBMs accessible Java software could work with the screen reader. No mention of Braille-display support yet, which many blind and deaf-blind people need and want."
Macs have included text-to-speech for quite some time. What they're offering is a completely spoken user interface.
Oh, and at NO ADDITIONAL COST.
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the strongest word is still the word "free"
Catching up? The mac os has had built in text to speech features since OS 7.5 at least. In 7.5 you could have any document on screen read back to you. Mac OS 8 added the feature to onscreen buttons and dialouge boxes. This is a full screen reader, as in every part of the screen from menues to buttons to dialouge boxes to web pages to applications.
T Money
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Microsoft's TTS is about what Apple had ten years ago. All it does is churp out window titles and text without much intelligence; something fairly useless to those who can't see it in the first place. Apple's solution actually helps them navigate and perform tasks.
Checkout Gnpernicus. Free screenreader for GNOME and GNOME compatible desktops.
found here
I am a legally blind FreeBSD (and former Linux) user. What is the problem? Yes, it takes some adaption, but that is no reason not to do it. If all else fails, you SSH to the machine from Windows using a screen reader.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
I'm legally blind myself and generally do not need to use any magnifier.
I usually just need to be a lot closer to the screen than most other users.
I use Linux a lot, and enjoy the Ctrl+ feature of Mozilla.
On Windows, I simply up the screen size by changing from 1024 768 to 800 600. (I wished linux could do this.)
I'm curious if you have any experience with gnopernicus which I tried to compile using an older Red Hat distro. I've since upgraded to Fedora but have yet to play with gnopernicus after all of the problems I originally encountered. (Which were likely all my fault for not using appropriate lib versions...)
You sound very similar to me. I also change color schemes to be white on black. Unfortunately, you can't do this on MacOS X (unless you use the Accessability option, which turns your display to greyscale). As a result, I've found myself using the OS X screen magnification features. They are very nice and I've learned to use them seamlessly. I do everything else you mentioned that you do, as well. I did set out to use gnopernicus once, but never really got around to finishing it. I seem to recall it wanting to use Festival for the speech output part, which seemed somewhat ugly to me. I also didn't much care for the GNOME screen magnification stuff I could find and get working.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
I was having a drink with a legally blind Teacher's Assistant friend of mine Friday (the day before this hit Slashdot) after work. He's a die-hard Windows user, precisely because of the (yes, this is the right price) $1200 application mentioned briefly in the article, which he uses.
I was inundated with questions; the news was out so fast amongst those who need this functionality that they caught me off guard. I had heard a bit. He knew far more.
Trust me, there is real interest in this. He wanted to know what hardware to buy that would support OSX. He knew the beta was out and knew people running it, and liked the feedback he'd heard so far.
Most of us that can see well don't consider the real question of what is a blind person? It turns out that is more than people who can't see anything. It also includes people who can't see very well, people with issues involving clear vision except directly where they are looking, people that can't look at one spot for very long and people who's vision is just so poor that they can't a 144 point font a foot away. Many of the people that fit into the groups I've listed used to be able to see clearly. The were never taught brail and many of them are in their 60's or older and attempting to learn brail is very hard for them.
My mother just had her eyeballs sewed back together so once again she can see enough to read a screen (with the right magnifications) but that was a short term fix. In another decade she won't be able to see anything that isn't fuzzy.
You can replace your text consoles with speech consoles in make menuconfig.
"The same reason documentation is lagging in FOSS, its not "cool". Everyone wants to be in on the latest desktop environment / compiler / kernel because it gets the publicity. A screen reader will not give you the cool factor that submitting a patch for the kernel would."
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Sorry, but that's absolute rubbish:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap
http://leb.net/blinux/
I can't believe the uninformed postings in this thread. Just because you're not aware of it doesn't mean it isn't happening. You can use a screenreader within Linux right now, try Gnopernicus within Gnome. A lot of accessibility work is taking place and access to this technology is all free.
You jest, but braille "displays" do exist. Infact you can even get braille notebooks.
I had a quick play with the technology at a demonstration once (I live in Christchurch, where this is developed), quite interesting for a sighted person.
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"In as much it might lock some people into apple's platform, I do not see how that would hinder competition in this market. If there is a better, lower cost solution people will migrate to it."
Yes, as I understand it Apple are only doing this because the only commercial solution that supported the Mac OS decided NOT to port their app to OSX. To qualify for gov't contracts Apple has to jump through some equal opps hoops sooooo they HAD to build their own screenreader.
In Panther's Universal Access preference pane, there's an "Enhance Contrast" feature.
I'm surprised no one's posted a link to this yet... O'Reilly's Mac Dev Center has a nice article on "the often misunderstood world of talking to your Mac" that goes over the existing speech (and speech recognition) interface.
A good overview of past and present, with a little bit of technical information there for AppleScripters too.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
There are a number of utils for converting RSS from apps like NetNewsWire to MP3 playlists and stuffing it on your iPod. One such app:
http://www.tow.com/software/read_it_to_me/
Basically, use NNW to manage the news you want (TONS of sources - BBC, CNN, weblogs, etc. but not all include the full article text) and a click or two will take all your unviewed feeds, text-to-speech them to MP3 and sync them to your iPod.
You can later just click through the ones you heard (or everything from the day), and the next day it'll only sync across the new content.
Lots of options on OS X, but not sure about Windows + iPod.