From: gcampbel@ecst.csuchico.edu (Gary Campbell)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: Re: Questionaire - Computer Access for Blind Users
Date: 12 Nov 92 02:48:23 GMT
Reply-To: gcampbel@ecst.csuchico.edu (Gary Campbell)
Organization: California State University, Chico
X-Fidonet: Blink Talk Conference
Originator: wtm@sheldev.shel.isc-br.com

Index Number: 25558

In article <25505@handicap.news> mthompso@nmsu.edu (Mike Thompson) writes:
>are most likely to encounter in industry after they complete
>their education at NMSU.

That sounds good, but it raises an interesting thought.  On the job the
speed and responsiveness of a screen reader are, I believe, more
important than the clarity of the speech.  The amount of training time
spent on a given system will be small compared to the amount of time the
user will be using that particular system.  In a University I still
believe that responsiveness is important (I would use the Sounding Board
any day over the old (not the new internal version) sluggish Decktalk),
but you are dealing with people who need to be able to use the system
sooner and will use it less, meaning that the time to learn to use the
system and understand the synthesizer will have to be shorter.  (Note:
This is my attempt to balance my belief that with synthesizers fast is
more important than clear and that many people spend too much money on
clear when faster would have been cheaper and more productive.)

>The approach we would like to take is to place speech and
>screen-enlarging software on our servers rather than on
>individual systems.  We would then make external speech
>synthesizers available to our users who need them.  The result

Sounds like a good goal, but let's see-- the user walks up to some
computer some where, plugs the external synthesizer into a serial (or
parallel if the synthesizer supports it) port-- that means there is an extra
one available on this arbitrary computer.  The screen reader is a TSR,
so he/she loads it, assuming that the computer isn't in some weird state
(which could be guaranteed (almost! :-)) by rebooting).  This sure won't
be practical with internal synthesizers!  I'm not sure how computer
neofites who are half scared of the thing anyway will work with this
situation, but as a more experienced user I would find the flexibility
nice (as long as I didn't walk up to a machine and find no serial port
when I gotta get that thing printed seconds before the deadline!).

>It is my understanding that most adaptive computer software and
>hardware has been developed for PCs (Macs, and other Desktop
>Systems), however, we are extremely interested in adapting our
>large systems, workstations, and network terminals as well.

Again, an excelent goal, but the only screen access systems today run on
PCs and Macs.  I am afraid that your only access path to the other
systems is to log on to them from a PC (or Mac I suppose).  It is
important that the terminal emulator used for this can write to BIOS (on
a PC) to make conversational mode easier.  Otherwise the user will have
trouble telling when the system has responded since direct display
updating via display memory is not as easily spoken.  I use an older
version of NCSA Telnet (V. 2.2 I think).  Some of the newer versions of
the derivative from Clarkson U. interfered with JAWS 1.0.
Oh yes, there is something called the Speaqualizer which will run in a
PC without requiring DOS, which would give access to UNIX on a PC, but
this isn't the kind of access to UNIX you are looking for.  I don't have
experience with this device and haven't heard too much about it.

>Finally, since we have only had experience with TSI products, we
>would appreciate your opinion on OSCAR, VertPlus, and VISTA.  How

I have not used Vert Plus, but my impression is that it is sluggish (I'm
thinking of an internal card) and that it is quite expensive.  If you
want a synthesizer of that type I would investigate the new internal
Decktalk card which is supposed to be more responsive and which, I
think, would be cheaper too.  I don't know whether or not the Vert Plus
screen reader will work with something other than the Vert Plus (Prose
4000) internal synthesizer card, so take this into consideration if you
go the external synthesizer root.  There used to be something called
Softvert which could run with other synthesizers.

Two other popular screen reader programs are JAWS from Henter-Joyce and
Vocal-Eyes from GW Micro.  These work with a wide range of synthesizers.
Henter-Joyce used to have a synthesizer demo tape which demonstrated
several synthesizers with comments to point out their strengths and
weaknesses which I thought was a very good aid in picking a synthesizer.
You might look at the Accent SA and Artic Transport synthesizers-- the
former has a good reputation and the latter is a new product that has
gotten a few good reviews in this echo-- I don't have experience with
either of them.  Which screen reader is best?  Well, that's kind of like
asking which word processor or text editor is best, and if you stick
around a while it's bound to come up again, probably hot and heavy!