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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.
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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.
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.
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 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.
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