Basic tasks using a screen reader with email in Outlook. Use a screen reader to format text in your email in Outlook. Basic tasks using a screen reader with the calendar in Outlook. Use the email in Outlook for Mac with VoiceOver, the built-in Mac OS screen reader, to do the essential basic tasks. You can create and send new emails.
The grandparent wasn't referring to their intellectual capabilities, he was pointing out that installing and configuring Linux is hard enough when you can see, and that it would be very difficult for someone who couldn't see. The key here is sight. Command-line installation is all text. Do you realize what the issue is there? Even if Linux did have a screen reader, the task of installing and configuring it would be such a hassle to a blind individual that it would be better for them to buy a Mac. 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. Obviously you've never installed something on a linux box using the command line. If it doesn't work on the first go (for whatever reason) you are going to be doing a lot of prowling through less-than-helpful text, line at a time. At least one kernel developer is blind, and I never found this out until we met in person. Sun in particular have done a ton of work on Linux accessibility - screen readers, input alternatives for people with physical impairments. Not currently any accessibility for audio (which isnt that daft an issue - consider a deaf quake player and presenting them with an 'audio radar' HUD) Also wonderful stuff like dasher, which I'm still not sure isnt really a game disguised as an access tool 8) Good to see.
I call bullshit, And if I had mod points I would mod your ass down as a troll. The average end user distro requires the same level of knowledge as the average windows install. Not to mention the potential difficulty behind trying to find a braille friendly license key. I know several blind people (legally blind, and completely blind) who use linux/BSD both as a main operating system and as a hobby system. Think about what your saying before you go off on some 'linux is not user friendly' tangent, p. 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. 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.
![Screen reader for outlook machine Screen reader for outlook machine](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125400663/437960201.png)
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. '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.' Sorry, but that's absolute rubbish: / 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. Unlikely to happen any time soon It's already happened. Read the other posts in this thread. 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. If you develop OSS to be 'cool' then you must have a very boring life.
And unlike commercial software, there is no profit motive. That's prett. 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.
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. 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. 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.'
Surely (and I'm not meaning you necessarily) we need a developer who says 'this is what my mother needs, so I will code it myself'. I have no idea how difficult coding this thing is, I'm just trying to say that developers for these products may often be someone for whom it is personally a need, rather than a developer for whom it is.
There seems to be some kind of twisted logic among companies who make any device or softwae for the dissabled that if you're deaf or blind, then you must be wealthy, right? Everything i see that was made to make a person with dissablilities life better/easier costs an arm and a leg. My girlfriend is deaf. My phone cost me $20 at walmart. Hers cost $500 (TTY). We live in a security building with a buzzer entrance. Guess how she knows someone is at the door?
The system we'd need to. The problem is that by and large things tailored for the disabled are more expensive to design and manufacture than mass market items.
There are also fewer people with disabilities than without. These two things unfortunately combine to mean that the things your girlfriend needs are going to be more expensive. Think of it this way, if a product takes 10 developers (making $40K / year) six months to develop, then I have to make $400,000 before I can even think about making a profit.
If 20,000 people want. 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: 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.
There's more to operating a computer blind than just having a screen reader. Reading a web page is the easy part; if you have to see an icon and point a mouse at it, you can't even open the browser. It needs to be operated either solely by keyboard, or have special modifications to support a force-feedback mouse. The Macintosh has always supported accelerators, but when I last looked I couldn't find any way to access non-accelerated menu items without a mouse.
Windows has supported mouseless operation from the beginning (not out of compassion for the blind, but because Windows 1.0 couldn't assume that you even owned a mouse.) I'm a huge fan of the section508.gov. Even non-disabled users can benefit from a display which is clear enough to be used by blind users. It forces the developer to think out a bit further ahead, but the end-user gains. That sounds slightly more cumbersome than the Windows standard, which is that ALT-letter always takes you to the menu beginning with that letter (and with some disambiguation rules). I use this all the time: I get to Slashdot with ALT-B s (Bookmarks-Slashdot). It's an incredibly concise gesture.
I'm a Java programmer; the standard Java Look and Feel also uses the same approach. OS X does seem to have dialogue-box navigation enabled by default, which is an excellent start.
It can be tricky to get right. How well does the Windows screenreader work? Do you have to get special versions of all the apps to work? How easy is it to make a screenreader aware application in Windows? Please anyone care to answer this? From following Apple's development of OS X, it seems to me that the idea behind Apple's upcoming Screenreader, is that you wont have to rewrite your applications to take advantage of this.if I remember correctly the capability is already in.
Never using the Windows screenreader myself maybe it works. No, you don't need special versions of all your applications. The screen readers use APIs and trickery in Windows to peel the text out of menus, dialogs, etc. It then reads it. So, as long as applications use the standard Windows methods for putting stuff on the screen, they will be.fairly. compatible with speech software.
![Screen Reader For Outlook Mac Screen Reader For Outlook Mac](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125400663/118305744.jpg)
However, when software starts to get fancy, uses graphics for text, etc, then you start to get problems. You also get problems when data is formatted oddly on the screen, such as in tabl. You don't need a special version, you add accessibility features to your application.
If your application is composed of regular dialogs, you don't actually need to do much, since standard controls provide reasonable default implementation of accessibilty API. In more complex applications, you implement accesibility interfaces that describe your application objects, and the way user may interact with them. R l= /library/en-us/msaa/msaastart9w2t.asp. 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. 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. 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 m. On my laptop (a CTL), everything is normaly too small. At first I changed the resolution to make things larger, but this causes fuzziness due to interpolation.
I later discovered that I have a DPI setting. By adjusting that, and staying in my 'default resolution', things can be made larger or smaller without the fuzziness.
I do not know, however, if this is a feature of Windows XP, or of the video driver that comes on my laptop (ATI Rage something). I really like using my laptop, now that everything is la. The DPI feature is a new-to-XP feature, and with modern laptop screens accelerating in resolution (mine is a 15' screen at 1600x1200, ISTR some are now doing 1920x1480+) the DPI feature is an absolute lifesaver, even for someone who isn't legally blind. DPI, along with ClearType, are the only reasons I use XP instead of Windows 2000 on my laptop. Most programs work fine with it (including, gratifyingly, Firefox/Thunderbird). A couple of badly written pieces of software - mostly old freeware VB programs. 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. On Windows, I simply up the screen size by changing from 1024 768 to 800 600.
(I wished linux could do this.) You have two options:. Ctrl+Alt+ plus/minus on the numerical keypad, to switch between video modes. It doesn't resize your desktop, but it offers an enlarged view that you can scroll with the mouse pointer. It has been in XFree86 since day zero.
XFree86 4.3 introduces the RandR extension, allowing both to change the video mode AND the desktop size, effectively changing resolution on the fly. For what it's worth, I'm not blind (well - myopic to all hell, but I can still read the screen without glasses as long as I'm a foot from it) but there's nothing like the OSX screen magnification for quick/easy/simple zooming in on ANY app to take a closer peek. Whether it be a small image on a webpage, a small embedded movie, a WMP movie (when trying to get win media player to play fullscreen is a pain in the ass slooow process, zooming is just quicker) or just zooming in to IRC from the sofa across the ro. I have no bias. I own two Windows machines, one FreeBSD machine, and one Apple machine.
I will blatantly tell you when something Apple does sucks, because I didn't really even like Apple until this last year when I actually gave OS X a try. My opinion has nothing to do with how many people use each OS, but is rather how I evaluate their included accessability.utilities. Now to take you to task on your bit about more people using Windows. This is.exactly. why more people say that Microsoft has better acce.
Actually, it's windows that is catching up. Mac has had text to speech services for quite a while. Also, there's a huge difference between a text-to-speech service and a screen reading application. A screen reader allows a sight impared user to actually navigate around the OS and use a variety of applications.
Text-to-speech is not that comprehensive. Just try closing your eyes and actually doing anything constructive with your Windows speech service. Text-to-speech is actually of more value for users w. It's insane, but not surprising, that nobody else on /. Knows about this program. Here's a quote from microsoft.com:. 'Narrator is a text-to-speech utility for users who are blind or have impaired vision.
Narrator reads what is displayed on your screen: the contents of the active window, menu options, or the text you have typed. Narrator is designed to work with Notepad, Wordpad, Control Panel programs, Internet Explorer, the Windows desktop, and Windows setup. Narrator may not read words aloud correc. 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. 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?? And that is a monopoly.
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. The original poster may have blamed the wrong technology, but the fact is that JAWS and Window Eyes (the big Windows Screen Readers), although they are undoubtedly fantastic advances over lack of access, are also somewhat flaky and fragile, and have a very complex user interface for navigating the computer. Combine this with the fact that software needs to be written thinking about working with screen readers to actually work properly/well and most software isn't, and the overall experience can be quite fru.
VoiceOver Refinements We’ve refined VoiceOver to make it easier to navigate PDFs, websites, and messages. In Safari, improved conformance with HTML5 accessibility standards allows for more consistent navigation of websites. VoiceOver is now better at reading aloud tagged PDFs and email messages. If you start reading a website in a different language, VoiceOver can switch to the voice for that language automatically.¹ And you can add custom commands and workflows to your MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. VoiceOver and Braille Support VoiceOver is the first screen reader to provide plug-and-play support for refreshable braille displays.
Plug in or sync one of over 100 compatible displays, and the VoiceOver description is presented to you in braille. In macOS High Sierra, you can edit seamlessly in Grade 2 Braille, viewing your edits in the context of the actual line of text. Converting between braille and text happens automatically so you see only Grade 2 Braille.
VoiceOver is also the only screen reader that supports more than one braille display at a time. So in a meeting or class, you can present what’s on your screen to multiple braille users simultaneously.
And for sighted users who sit alongside you, there’s an onscreen braille panel that displays both braille and plain-text versions of the descriptions spoken by VoiceOver. Dictation Dictation lets you talk where you would type — and it works in over 40 languages.
So you can reply to an email, search the web, or write a report using just your voice. Navigate to any text field, activate Dictation, then say what you want to write.
MacOS also comes with more than 50 editing and formatting commands. So you can turn on Dictation and tell your Mac to bold a paragraph, delete a sentence, or replace a word. You can also use Automator workflows to create your own Dictation commands. Zoom on Mac Zoom is a powerful built-in magnifier that lets you enlarge your screen up to 20 times, so you can better see what’s on the display. Set up a shortcut for quickly zooming in and out by selecting “Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom” in the Zoom pane of Accessibility in System Preferences.
You can zoom using full screen or picture-in-picture, allowing you to see the zoomed area in a separate window while keeping the rest of the screen at its native size. A shortcut key lets you pan the screen without moving the pointer while zoomed in. MacOS can also flash the screen for notifications offscreen or speak text under your pointer.
The hardware acceleration engine lets you boost the size of everything on your screen — text on a web page, family photos, a place on a map.