[laptop-accessibility] accessibility Digest, Vol 12, Issue 5
Lesley Thacker
lesleydianet at gmail.com
Sat Mar 22 13:54:25 EDT 2008
As for me, more than anything, I would like a screen reader
application that would highlight each word as it's read in a write or
abiword document -- or even in a pdf for downloaded books. This would
be a godsend for younger readers, struggling readers, people with
disabilities, and people learning second languages.
My second request would be a talking word processor that would echo
keystrokes in write and then after a space, read the word.
There are many many programs like this that exist in windows and mac
-- some open source. Check out http://www.oatsoft.org/
I would love to help but I'm not a coder. I'm learning. :)
Lesley Thacker
Fayetteville AR
On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 11:00 AM,
<accessibility-request at lists.laptop.org> wrote:
> Send accessibility mailing list submissions to
> accessibility at lists.laptop.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/accessibility
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> accessibility-request at lists.laptop.org
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> accessibility-owner at lists.laptop.org
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of accessibility digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: next sugar meeting: text-to-speech (Samuel Klein)
> 2. Re: [sugar] OLPC Usability Testing Class Project (Tomeu Vizoso)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:17:42 -0400
> From: "Samuel Klein" <sj at laptop.org>
> Subject: Re: [laptop-accessibility] next sugar meeting: text-to-speech
> To: "Hemant Goyal" <goyal.hemant at gmail.com>
> Cc: Arjun Sarwal <arjun at laptop.org>, OLPC - Accessibility List
> <accessibility at lists.laptop.org>, sugar at lists.laptop.org, Assim Deodia
> <assim.deodia at gmail.com>
> Message-ID:
> <5396c0d10803191217g3d280edbobef5ff18cf817aa4 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> There's also growing interest in TTS from some potential Summer of Code
> students, proposing a number of literacy projects. A focused meeting for
> this would be well done.
>
> SJ
>
> On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 8:01 AM, Hemant Goyal <goyal.hemant at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > My apologies for not being present for this sugar meeting (my school exams
> > got over today).
> >
> > * santhosh and HFactor present Dhvani, a text-to-speech system for
> > > indian languages.
> > > o santhosh has already worked into integrating Dhvani into Speech
> > > Dispatcher.
> >
> >
> > This is great news! The packaging of speech dispatcher and dotconf is
> > going on, and we'll pick up some speed now that we are free from exams. One
> > of the dependencies of speech-dispathcer,DOTCONF is already approved and the
> > author of the package has been sponsored by a FEDORA Packaging mentor. The
> > next package to be accepted will be speech-dispatcher.
> >
> >
> > > in today meeting we have agreed on the convenience of having a meeting
> > > mainly focused on the use of text-to-speech systems in Sugar. If
> > > everybody agree, will take place Tuesday March 25 at 15.00 UTC.
> >
> >
> > Brilliant,! I've added a few points that I think I would like to discuss
> > with the sugar team.
> >
> > I'm sending this to the Accessibility list in the hope that someone
> > > will be interested in contributing in this area.
> > >
> > > If you are interested in attending, please add to the attendants and
> > > topics in:
> > >
> > >
> > > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_dev_meeting#Tuesday_March_25_2008_.28.22TTL-meeting.22.29_exceptional_time:_15.00_.28UTC.29
> >
> >
> > Just for an update, I tried running orca with speech-dispatcher and at a
> > high level it worked fine. However since we have not been able to integrate
> > basic speech synthesis in sugar, I have avoided researching about this
> > option just yet.
> >
> > Thank you for keeping a special meeting for TTS!
> >
> > Best,
> > Hemant
> >
> -------------- next part --------------
> An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
> URL: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/accessibility/attachments/20080319/75730d60/attachment-0001.htm
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:04:52 +0100
> From: "Tomeu Vizoso" <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net>
> Subject: Re: [laptop-accessibility] [sugar] OLPC Usability Testing
> Class Project
> To: "Frederick Grose" <fgrose at gmail.com>
> Cc: accessibility at lists.laptop.org, health at lists.laptop.org,
> devel at lists.laptop.org, sugar at lists.laptop.org
> Message-ID:
> <242851610803200504t5ae68e82q5e77c3bd7423b1ac at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 11:24 PM, Frederick Grose <fgrose at gmail.com> wrote:
> > This note is a request for the broader community to consider potential topic
> > areas that might be prime for some usability testing.
> >
> > (Here is a quick review of usability testing,
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability_testing.)
> >
> > Professor Keith Karn in the Information Technology Department,
> > http://it.rit.edu/it/, of the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in
> > Rochester, NY will have 4-5 graduate students (from his class of 20)
> > propose, and over the next 10 weeks, execute a usability testing
> > consultation around the XO or OLPC project. The class met for the first
> > time on Wednesday 12 March 2008, and will meet, as a whole, every Wednesday
> > 6-9:50 pm EDT through 21 May 2008. This OLPC project team will be asked to
> > review the wiki.laptop.org and then contact me as client representative.
> > Because of the academic schedule, we need to review and select a testing
> > topic area in the next 7 days and have a final testing plan prepared by 26
> > March 2008.
> >
> > What usability issue is currently most timely and significant to the
> > project? Since OLPC is developing a new information and communication
> > technologies platform, there are many possibilities for significant target
> > users, subsystems, components, and activities.
>
> I suggest starting first with observing general usage of the Sugar
> shell and base activities (Browse, Read, Write, Paint and Journal) and
> move from there to other activities. At this point, I don't think more
> focused testing will be as useful.
>
> > Please think about the project design needs, possibilities, and constraints,
> > and suggest topics or issues here or to our wiki page,
> > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Rochester%2C_NY#Project_ideas.
> >
> > We have a few G1G1 XOs in Rochester that we should be able to use for live
> > testing with local children. Larger scale tests could be performed with
> > emulated XOs or hosted Sugar in the RIT Usability Laboratories. The class
> > will be expected to go through the human subject reviews as required.
> >
> > Because so many cultural variables may be important modifiers of
> > understanding user interactions with the OLPC project, perhaps there may be
> > some more basic or common psycho-physical aspects of usability we could
> > address that would be timely and significant for the project. Or, we might
> > be able to recruit user participants from one of the recently settled
> > immigrant communities in the Rochester area to delve into the
> > internationalization and cultural domains.
>
> Having different groups of children based on age and previous contact
> with computers may be more important than cultural differences, in my
> opinion.
>
> > Some reviewers of OLPC have been critical of the shortage of reported
> > usability testing results, so far, however, if we appreciate the pace and
> > resourcing of the development, perhaps this is a chance to address any gaps
> > or curiosities that you may have.
>
> We have already had some feedback from the pilot tests, but until now
> and because of time and other constraints, hasn't been as systematic
> as we need. Having your commented observations about which tasks are
> more problematic would already be extremely useful.
>
> > We would welcome your thoughts (particularly on usability issues in the near
> > term).
> >
> > Thanks to everyone for all their efforts!
>
> I'm afraid now is not a good moment to ask a big involvement from the
> Sugar developers, but I'm sure we'll make our best at answering more
> concrete questions that you have.
>
> Thanks and good luck,
>
> Tomeu
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> accessibility mailing list
> accessibility at lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/accessibility
>
>
> End of accessibility Digest, Vol 12, Issue 5
> ********************************************
>
More information about the accessibility
mailing list