[bcab] Re: WebAnywhere: a free screen reader accessed via the

Adrian,
I take your point, but suspect that there might be quite a large target audience for this kind of provision among partially sighted people, dyslexics, dyspraxics and those who have other conditions that result in visual tiredness. Not to mention people like myself who for a long time didn't realise I was struggling on while I could have been registered as blind. Such people may not be habitual screen reader users, but could find it very helpful for this kind of technology to be available occasionally. 

Vince.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Adrian Higginbotham" <adrian.higginbotham@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <bcab@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, April 28, 2008 9:38 AM
Subject: [bcab] Re: WebAnywhere: a free screen reader accessed via the
Sounds pretty much like ReadSpeaker which is also free to the end user but has a cost for the site owner and requires that they subscribe to the service. Same technology different application. Personally I've always been unclear as to the intended audience for applications which add screenreader like capabilities to the Web but only on the assumption that you can get as far as the Browser or target website without them. If you needed that degree of functionality you'd find it very difficult to get to a given site without assistance especially on an unfamiliar machine where you might not be aware of where you are starting from EG the desktop or a log-in screen. If you areteh sort of user who can get around unaided but might want some help with reading detailed or lengthy text, announcing complex or contextual words then this is different to a VI type screenreader. 

Adrian Higginbotham
Project manager: Learning services
Becta
Tel: Direct dial 024 7679 7333 - Becta switchboard 02476-416994.
Email: Adrian.Higginbotham@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.becta.org.uk/
BECTA, Millburn Hill Road, Science Park, Coventry, CV4 7JJ

-----Original Message-----
From: bcab-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bcab-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Simon HARPER 
Sent: 25 April 2008 16:02
To: bcab@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bcab] Re: WebAnywhere: a free screen reader accessed via the

Hi Guys,
So as far as I'm aware WebAnywhere is for use on machines - mainly public machines when there is no access to USB or CD for security purpose; and for situations such as kiosks etc. It works by generating Speech for an http session on the server side and encoding it as MP3 - then sends it to the client via JavaScript calls coded into the page by a proxy. It's some pretty cool Web Engineering especially because the latency is not noticeable as their encode and send algorithms are leading edge. 

Cheers
Si.

====
Simon Harper
University of Manchester (UK)
Human Centred Web Lab: http://hcw.cs.manchester.ac.uk My Site: http://hcw.cs.manchester.ac.uk/people/harper/ 
My Diary (iCal): http://hcw.cs.manchester.ac.uk/diaries/SimonHarper.ics


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On 25 Apr 2008, at 13:03, Michael Whapples wrote:


On Fri, 2008-04-25 at 02:03 -0400, BCAB_Digest@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Subject: [bcab] Re: WebAnywhere: a free screen reader accessed via
the
web
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:55:20 +0100
From: "Adrian Higginbotham" <adrian.higginbotham@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

SaToGo isn't open source no.
NVDA is open source and while it isn't web based it is portable so
can
be run from a usb stick or CD so can easily auto start without any
keyboard interaction at all.
http://www.nvda-project.org/

WebAnywhere is opensource as well, although the indications from
what I
have read is that it hasn't always.


Would be nice if nvda and web anywhere worked together to save
duplicating work.

Might be good, but that is one of the advantages of open source, they
don't need to actually work together, the other can always learn by
looking at the code and taking anything that looks good (I don't know
which open source license WebAnywhere is under, and it might make it
harder for the two to mix if it is GPL incompatible). This then means
that they may go slightly different ways, but not actually be creating
all the stuff themselves. Yes it is better if they work together to
help
understand what they are trying to do, but it isn't as necessary as it
might be for closed source software.



Adrian Higginbotham
Project manager: Learning services
Becta
Tel: Direct dial 024 7679 7333 - Becta switchboard 02476-416994.
Email: Adrian.Higginbotham@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.becta.org.uk/
BECTA, Millburn Hill Road, Science Park, Coventry, CV4 7JJ




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