[laptop-accessibility] How can the XO be made accessible to blind

[Joshua Seal]

Hemant,
 
It sounds like your up to some great things. I use a screen reader with my
PC all the time, not because I am visually impaired, but because I am
dyslexic. From my prospective Text to Speech is extremely important and has
helped me a great deal throughout my education and now my job - which is to
develop peripherals for OLPC.
 
I currently use this software;
http://www.texthelp.com/page.asp?pg_id=1071
 
It enables you to read any text on your screen. You select text, press play,
and listen. A handy feature is that the reader will continue to read
paragraphs below your selected text until you tell it to stop. 
 
This email is less about direction and more about encouragement as I believe
this is a truly valuable piece of software. 
 
Please feel free to contact me if you feel my prospective on this issue
could help.
 
Kind regards,
 
 
Josh

  _____  

From: devel-bounces at lists.laptop.org [mailto:devel-bounces at lists.laptop.org]
On Behalf Of Hemant Goyal
Sent: 30 December 2007 17:52
To: accessibility at lists.laptop.org; devel at lists.laptop.org
Cc: Arjun Sarwal; Cody Lodrige; tomhannen at gmail.com; Assim Deodia
Subject: Re: How can the XO be made accessible to blind


Hi,

We have been working on a simple screen reader for the XO and have made some
headway. We have ported and customized eSpeak for the XO. A text to speech
server has been written and methods exposed through Dbus . I have documented
the work done till now at  <http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Screen_Reader>
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Screen_Reader. The DBUS api may be changed in the
future. However, we still need to do some extensive testing and refine the
structure of the speech server. 

We had initially planned to provide a simple highlight and speak option for
the xo. We now think that we should scale up and structure the project to
use eSpeak in a much more effective manner to provide accessibility to
blind/low vision students. 

I think it would be brilliant if activity developers could exploit the
underlying speech server to write accessible activities. For example, an
activity at present can connect to the speech service through dbus and send
it strings of text to be spoken. We hope to prepare some guidelines for
activity developers to write accessible activities that could use the speech
server. What would be best way to do this? 

We are also planning to explore Orca.  We dont want to rush into development
now, and would like to take some time in properly planning our approach and
creating some design documents first.

It'll be nice if experts could share their ideas and provide us with some
direction for this project. 

Thank you and wishing you all a very Happy New Year.

Warm regards,
Hemant Goyal



Message: 1
Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2007 15:57:38 +0000
From: "Gabey8" <accessibility at lists.laptop.org>
Subject: [laptop-accessibility] How can the XO be made accessible to 
       blind   users?
To: accessibility at lists.laptop.org
Message-ID: <1198857458.m2f.4754 at olpc.osuosl.org
<mailto:1198857458.m2f.4754 at olpc.osuosl.org> >


I have some deaf-blind friends who use braille attachments to access their
computers.

What needs to be done in order to permit the XO to work with a braille
terminal or notetaker? What screen reading programs are available for Linux?


And if said screen reading programs don't like working with Sugar (yet,
anyway), is setting the XO up to boot to the terminal screen and going with
text-only a viable solution for braille users?

Donna

------------------------
Donna -- purple outline with orange fill color. If you see me in the
Neighborhood, say hi! :)


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