[sword-devel] commending your work for use by blind people

Leon Brooks sword-devel@crosswire.org
Sun, 4 May 2003 13:13:44 +0800


On Thu, 1 May 2003 06:06, mpj@eBible.org wrote:
> (1) Make your program work with windows 95 and above since some
> people use older computers with windows 95.

I know of at least one still using Windows 3.11.

> The two most popular screen-readers are Windoweyes and Jaws for
> Windows. I would be willing to try to get people to help with any
> special assistance in making any future programs you develop as
> accessible as possible.

A good extra, methinks, would be a "speak this passage" option that will 
use something like Festival to articulate the verse(s) through the 
sound system or into a file (for attachment to email). Having the app 
explicitly announce where it is and what it's doing might also be good.

Festival is at http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ and does 
English (yankee and pom dialects), Spanish, and (of all things) Welsh 
text-to-speech in four different voices.

If you're writing in Java, there is also FreeTTS.

If any of the popular screen-scrapers have APIs to allow apps to 
explicitly talk through them, we should probably look at that too.

Cheers; Leon