RE: Screen readers

Home page Reader is nice and rather effective but it comes at a cost.  Many
(Most?) blind people who use the web seem to use screen readers which can
read the text off the screen but with some constraints.  A very basic reader
which makes you cut and paste your text into it is Read Please from
http://readplease.com/ which is free for the basic version.  This will give
some idea of how text will sound.

Harry

-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of Kynn Bartlett
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2001 3:21 AM
To: Phillip Pi
Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: ASCII Ribbon Campaign


At 11:12 AM 10/30/2001 , Phillip Pi wrote:
>Kynn, is there a freeware version or even an open source version? I don't
>want to use it if it is limited (e.g. short amount of time). Thanks.

Nope.  Most screenreaders cost big $$$ -- Jaws, for example is
something like $700 or $800, or $1200 or so if you're using Windows
NT/2000.  You can find things like IBM's Home Page Reader for a more
affordable $150 -- and I recommend it to EVERY professional web
developer -- but I don't know if it will read your email messages
for you.  (It might!)

You can try TV Raman's EmacSpeak, which is an Emacs-based application
(and which is free and might even be open source) to read web pages
out loud and maybe even other stuff.  It's also notable for having
aural CSS support, but I haven't gotten it running myself so I can't
vouch for it.

Many operating systems have the ability to speak things, if you figure
out how to make it work -- e.g. recent versions of Windows, or MacOS
for a long time now.  Actually getting content of an email message
read out loud may be tricky, though, as these "mini-screenreaders"
are quite limited in functionality.

--Kynn

--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@reef.com>
Technical Developer Liaison
Reef North America
Accessibility - W3C - Integrator Network
________________________________________
BUSINESS IS DYNAMIC. TAKE CONTROL.
________________________________________
http://www.reef.com

Received on Tuesday, 30 October 2001 14:30:56 UTC