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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."
If Apple wants to get into a new market, this is it. Give out a free screen reader, make it work with major applications like Office and Safari, and you've just cornered the entire blind market.
And I say this as an avid Linux user.
IAALS.
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.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
No mention of Braille-display support yet, which many blind and deaf-blind people need and want
If little glass bumps come shooting out of my monitor, I'm going to be scared.
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
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
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
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.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
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?
Unlikely to happen any time soon
Why?
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.
And unlike commercial software, there is no profit motive.
This is why Linux will struggle for a while to gain mainstream desktop acceptance. Linux offers an excellent mainstream desktop, as long as your requirements arent slightly different. If they are, have fun trying to find something to satisfy your requirements. If people are going to switch, they need that bit extra - something they wont find on a commercial OS. Which is why it is rather annoying that the major desktop environments are trying to follow the Windows methodology rather than finding what Windows doesnt offer, and filling the niche.
Sadly, this is a byproduct of a free market. Less demand means higher prices. There aren't many people buying screenreaders, since there aren't that many blind people compared to other people. However, most blind people can get assistance from organizations and the government for buying this sort of thing.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
So you'd rather that they not make this and let blind people have the "freedom" to choose what thousand dollar screen reader to buy for what platform, instead of having it built in FOR FREE?!? Yup let them spend thousand of dollars just to avoid a "lock-out". I can't believe you.
WTF?
Ok, to become a betatester, do I have to poke my eyes out ??
This is the sig that says NI (again)
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.
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...)
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
Well if windows had one that wasn't junk (as user drdink noted above) and somebody could code one for open source that really worked apple wouldn't have a monopoly.
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.
What is something to be more cynical about are all the webmasters who thoughtlessly don't code well enough so a blind person might navigate their site properly.
At least apple is doing something.
Do you think there will ever be a screen reader for flash??
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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?
Apple produces a product, Mac OSX. Now they're introducing a new product to go along with OSX, which has the possibility to be very helpful, for free.
There exists alternatives to OSX (Windows and the various commercial screenreaders hinted at in the summary), therefore there is no monopoly. Possibly an oligopoly, but that's only due to a limited marketplace and the lack of a need to have many competitors.
Chill, this is a good thing.
"Why do you consent to live in ignorance and fear?" - Bad Religion
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.
Being blind does not automatically exclude you from being tech-literate. You would be amazed at what 'disabled' people can do in the face of narrow-sighted prejudice and stereotyping.
(Why was parent modded insightful? Since when has denegrating the intelectual capabilities of blind people [even in poor jest] been considered insightful?)
The man with no surname and a silly hat
On the universe: It's bunk.
A monopoly is when a market is unbreachable due to the cost of entry being higher than is affordable due to the major player enjoying massive economies of scale, and being able to set the prices accordingly in order to maximise profits or keep competition at bay.
There will be absolutely no barrier to entry for Microsoft, KDE, Gnome, IBM, or whomever else care to develop a screen reader interface for the 97% of desktops out there that are not OS X compatible. There will also be no barrier to a skilled developer releasing a version for the Mac that is superior to Apple's own implementation. There are plenty of examples of non-free or more expensive solutions being preferred by consumers on the Mac: Appleworks is not exactly superfluous for example.
Did you ever consider that the monopolists here are the companies charging $1200 for their software? Maybe this will bring some competition into the market? Maybe you'll learn something, anything, about economics?
As for your final paragraph of trolling (and yes, this is almost the definition of trolling, passing off your opinion as some kind of truth), Apple systems may not be to your tastes but they are most certainly to mine, and many people I know. I'm forced to use Windows XP at work, along with the Solaris and AIX systems I develop. I also keep a Linux machine running KDE 3.2 on my desk with the excuse that it's easier to administer the systems that I have to support. All of these system pale in comparison to the flexibility and ease of use of Mac OS X, and the quality of the hardware (OK maybe not the IBM p670 in the corner ;-), which is why I flogged all of my x86 kit and bought three Macs for my home last year, and haven't looked back once.
Do you not think it a little contrary to accuse Apple of a monoplistic attitude in one sentence and then complain of their existence in the next? The REAL monopoly here is with Microsoft, who could EASILY implement a real screen reader interface for a fraction of a percent of their development budget and bundle it free with their OS to reach a userbase orders of magnitudes larger than Apple will (realistically) ever hope to reach.
Keep you pathetic trolling to yourself.
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.
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.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
My mother is blind. She had failed cataract surgery in 1996, and unfortunately, her and my brother have had a combined total of 13 surgeries. (Whereas I got off easy with one detached retina in 1989.)
We can muse all we want about how Linux needs a screenreader, but I don't care if Microsoft and SCO made a screenreader made out of DRM'd GPL source dipped in goatblood.
My mother needs something better than Zoomtext. She needs a screenreader. And all politics aside, I'll buy her a fucking iMac if she gets a free screenreader because of it. I love her more than politics.
Open source is not just about free-as-in-beer, it's not just about free-as-in-speech, it's about free-as-in-people. Too often as open source developers we think, "this is what's good for the GPL" or "this is what's good for a feature list," not "this is what's good for some guy's mother."
Thar's what opensource is about; not feature lists, not the efficiency of inetd, it's about users. We are their servants. May we serve them honorably, so they may have sight -- may we give them gifts, that we may be invisible.
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.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
The best programmer I paired with for labs at the university was blind. He was running Linux with a text to braille gizmo under his laptop. The fact all was text based was a boon for him (he didn't use X, he probably used screen.)
Most students had a hard time following his lead because he knew all the code of the projects he worked on by heart (I think he has a perfect memory), so be jumped left and right in the code (going directly at the right line number) at an amazing speed. We worked on his box simulatenously through kibbitz.
"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,
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
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.