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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."
This is a call to all able programmers.
Grab a Jolt or a coffee and get cracking on an even freer Linux screen reader!
As a legally blind person and a person who has used various screen reader programs, I assure you that the Microsoft solution integrated into Windows just blows. It lacks features that any retail screenreader would have. The Microsoft one just blindly reads dialog boxes and stuff with no intelligence, no ability to really convey to the user how data is laid out, etc. The "screen reader" that is in Windows 2000 and up is about on par with what has been in MacOS for a long time. I agree with this article that any decent screen reading software costs hundreds of dollars. In my opinion, the Microsoft solution isn't useful for much more than installing Windows and getting your screenreader installed. Oh, and MacOS X's screen magnification stuff kicks the ass off of the Magnifier integrated in Windows 2000 and up.
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Most Modern Linux distributions (no, Debian and Slackware aren't "modern") have special accessibility features, such as braille machine support, plus linux can installed, configured and maintained easily. I recommend SuSE a the most accessible distro!
Moderators, please try out a modern distro before modding up ignorance!
A very good question. I said I was "legally blind", not "physically blind." Legally blind means your vision is worse than 20/200. My vision is far worse than that. I can't even see the big E on the eye chart, and only have been able to once or twice throughout my entire life. So, I can see but not very well. My eye doctor has a very unscientific method to determine if my vision has changed since I can't use the eyechart. Counting fingers at X feet.
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I have a blind friend who has been using kSayIt for a while and loves it! He also loves the freedom in being able to choose his distro, desktop environment, window manager, e-mail client, yada yada yada. Chalk up another win for Free/Open Source Software, cuz last I talked to him (earlier this week) Ronnie sez he is never going back to Windows.
bash: rtfm: command not found
Yeah, the color thing is a problem as well. I'm completely color blind, Ctrl A is my friend a lot fo times for web pages.
What bothers me so much is that all of these hacks don't scale, literally. For example, when you up the font size in any given GUI environment, it typically only applies to the content. The meta stuff, like menu bars, remain small. Ironically even if you do it on a "system wide" basis. I've seen in gnome the content of the menus, (stuff you pull down) will scale to larger text, but the menu from which you "pulled down" is still using small fonts.
Even more irritating, and the reason I bothered with gnopernicus in the first place, was that applets in a web page don't get resized. (I play this online game which uses an applet and I'm completely hosed on anything other than windows, which doesn't let me scale *everything* up to 800 x 600).
this has me now wondering how many slashdot readers have disabilities and how they adapt to using the computer and what modifications they did,
In Panther, that first sets your display to grayscale and then inverts the colors. So, you lose all color and everything is inverted. What I'd really like to see is a feature where it only inverts "white-likeA" and "black-like" colors so I can still have a normally colored display with high contrast text. Or alternatively, add a "High Contrast" mode to Aqua. I know they really don't want to stray from their Holy Aqua Interface, but come on... there are people who *need* something different in order to use it properly.
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This is exactly why it's much easier for screen-readers to handle a linux environment than a windows/mac one. You can read text. It's rather more difficult to read graphics, images, buttons and the like.
Free software is actually greatly used by the disabled for computer interfaces. Unlike windows, projects can freely modify the source code to work better for the blind and other such groups, and they have. This is one of the arenas where foss shines.
Any others who do this as well? Any tips for better software for this purpose than Festival? It's not too bad, but it's not terrific either.
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I had a legally blind friend who had a braille notebook. This was back in the DOS days, before windows. It didn't have a screen -- just the braille keyboard, and a floppy drive, and a speaker. I guess it looked more like a long black brick than a notebook.
The thing that always amused me about it was that it was from Australia, and the speech synthesizer spoke with an Australian accent. I would have thought that computers would make accent-less speech, but I was wrong.
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My research is in retinal degenerations, but where I work, we have patients who lose their vision for a number of reasons from trauma to corneal problems to diabetes and other pathologies. One of our most valuable services we have is helping people make the transition from the world of the sighted to living without vision cues. I am currently looking at this code for OS X (have known about it for some time) and I will push hard to make it the de-facto standard for our patients as it simplifies their life (try dealing with all the various security problems and stability problems of Windows without using your eyes) and will be easier on their budgets as it will come free with OS X.
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Apple seems to have picked up an interesting strategy over the past few years, regarding features they think "ought to be" on the Mac. They'll wait a short time to give a third party developer a chance to supply that application, but if they don't, or Apple is unsatisfied with the result, they'll move in and release their own version for free. Sometimes this strategy succeeds (Safari, this screen reader) and sometimes it doesn't (the Sherlock/Watson mess). While this is not all that far from Microsoft's much-hated "bundling" tricks, at least it should be better than the accessibility features of 10.3