Showcase: Part II

Visually Impaired

For the visually impaired there are tools which bring the computer to life. Screen readers do exactly that – they are voice synthesizers which read the page displayed. There are a variety of programs which are quite comprehensible, and some which are completely impossible to understand. Screen readers will read what is displayed and what is typed. Several examples include:

LookOut – found at http://www.screenreader.co.uk/products/lookout.htm; you can try the sample voices on this site, and these are the some of the best ones that have come to attention thus far. They are still not natural-sounding voices, but are good tools to be used to aid computing for the visually impaired. The company puts out a different software package which translates the screen output to a Braille display (to be covered later in this showcase).


JAWS – found at http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_products/software_jaws.asp; the “virtual showroom” with a short flash movie on some of the features offered by this program shows that this is a more extensive program, offering integration of its voice synthesizer with every type of application available, including chatware. JAWS offers a very clear synthesizer capability as well, with voices provided by NeoSpeech, found at http://www.neospeech.com/. This company offers many different TTS (Text-to-Speech) functions and a demo can be found on their website. JAWS provides for output to refreshable Braille displays in its package.

Window-Eyes will provide you with a challenge if you go to their demo and try to understand what is being said. Their product is found at http://www.gwmicro.com/products/ and was not the most effective TTS program found. You will understand why when you visit and try to listen to the sound clips (hint: do so with closed eyes).

Home Page Reader, an IBM product, is another similar software package. Found at http://www-3.ibm.com/able/solution_offerings/hpr.html, there is a 7.5-minute clip from a PBS show which featured this software in a segment. Home Page Reader is more of a browser than a software package but its developer promises future improvements, such as Adobe Reader capabilities, and even using it for Flash media.

(cont'd next post)