Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Apple's Accessibility Voice

Just got out of a "Making Your Application Accessible" session here at Apple's WWDC. It was okay, admittedly I am not much of a programmer. I did go to the python session earlier today, and I have to say that I think it would be a good language to teach kids how to program -- which means it might suit me as well ;-)

It's good to see that Apple is addressing accessiblity -- although they use the section 508 stick to motivate -- I prefer the carrot of building a next generation user experience -- where screen dominated interaction may be just one way to work with a device.

Speech synthesis is still one of the weak links in their scheme to make Apple the premiere platform for accessibility. If you don't know what I mean, I suggest seeking out someone who is using JAWS on a PC and spend some time with them. In all the examples Apple shows for accessibility they have the speech sythesis set at a "normal" speed. But that is not how many visually impaired people use a computer -- the speech is typically sped up considerably -- it almost borders on gibberish -- as I dicovered the first time I worked with a student that works for us -- who is a gifted programmer, very computer savvy -- and visually impaired.

Speeding up speech synthesis on a Mac gives you clipped phonemes -- speech gets mangled to the point where you can't understand what is being said. Go try it for yourself -- go to Preferences, go to Speech, and turn speed up to maybe 3/4 to maximum -- and now open some text in text edit and have it read to you. Now, turn it down to midway and play the same text. Now, turn it up to maximum. It clips phonemes.

Cepstral has voices for the Mac that sound much better. I have David installed on my workstation, but unfortunately not on my laptop here. It is not flawless -- but a noticable improvement.

There are open source efforts such as Festival that show some promise. Perhaps it would be good for Apple to get behind one of these and adopt it for the Mac.

I think this illustrates the problem with accessible efforts for programmmers are fresh to the issues of accessibility. I really believe that Apple is intent on doing the right thing, but they simply didn't recognize the way that computer savvy visually impaired folks use a computer. I know that I didn't see Apple speech synthesis as a problem until I actually worked with our student programmer. Now, I am beginning to learn what to look for. It is not enough to just turn off the monitor and try to navigate -- everyone (visually impaired or not) wants a computer interface that is quick, easy to use and just allows them to get their work done.

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