- From: Thomas Broyer <t.broyer@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 14:55:35 +0200
- To: public-html@w3.org
2007/9/11, Jane Lee: > > Might I note the existence of voiceover, which is Apple's response to > the lack of screenreaders for OS X? Apple's accessibility folks have > done a pretty good job with all the universal access tools built into > OS X for both users and developers (e.g. > http://developer.apple.com/reference/Cocoa/idxAccessibility-date.html > and http://developer.apple.com/ue/) - something Windows and any > combination of software for it, including Jaws, can't provide. See also: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/default.aspx http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa163285.aspx http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.accessibleobject.aspx And .NET 3.0 adds speech recognition and speech synthesis, along with the new UI Automation accessibility framework: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.speech.recognition.aspx http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.speech.synthesis.aspx http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms753388.aspx I think the main problem, as with web sites, is the lack of use of these technologies by software developers. I hope someone from Microsoft will answer me: are *all* Microsoft products (beginning with Windows itself and all its out-of-the-box programs) using these APIs to provide accessible information? > Voiceover is even available on the OS X install disk... AFAIK, Windows XP came with speech synthesis out-of-the-box too; so is Vista (I don't know about Server 2003). > visually impaired Windows users I know were shocked at the idea of > having a screenreader-assisted install process without any hackery.. > they're all used to asking a sighted person to install Windows for them, > or to get an unattended install version. I don't know any visually impaired person (so even less one who uses a computer), so I can't judge; and I never tried either by myself. I'm just sharing what I see: - Windows XP has a "speech" (or "voice", I don't know, my french version reads "voix") icon in the config panel, - Microsoft Active Accessibility (COM) is said to be around for 10 years, - .NET has accessibility features (for software developers) from version 1.0 (see System.Windows.Forms.AccessibleObject above) - .NET 3.0 (included in Vista and available for free for XP-SP2 and Server-2003-SP1) has speech recognition and synthesis APIs > I wish Microsoft would step up and do something about it. I can't judge the quality, but at least these tools and APIs (seem to) exist. -- Thomas Broyer
Received on Tuesday, 11 September 2007 12:55:45 UTC