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

Isaac,
You are correct. SAtogo has a client which is downloaded and installed. I suspect that all speech convertion is done at the client end, and like yourself, I think converting to speech on the server would probably result in overload in a very short time, particularly since it would probably have to handle the dns side of things as well.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Léonie Watson" <tink@xxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <bcab@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, April 25, 2008 9:20 PM
Subject: [bcab] Re: WebAnywhere: a free screen reader accessed via the



Isaac,

Curiously, I think they're all worthwhile approaches. The
innovations in screen reading technology in the last couple of years are
presenting us with more choice, depending on the job at hand and the
limitations of the system.

It seems that we have a relatively fixed layer in our traditional
screen readers, the option to hot desk with something like SA To Go and the 
option to quickly access web content when you don't/can't install anything
to the computer, with Web Anywhere.

The limitations of server side TTS are certainly worth noting
though. As a popular option, the server load would be considerable I
imagine, but perhaps with adequate mirroring this could still be possible.
Load bearing isn't my strong point I'm afraid.

Regards,
Léonie.


-----Original Message-----
From: bcab-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bcab-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf 
Of Isaac Porat
Sent: 25 April 2008 20:52
To: bcab@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bcab] Re: WebAnywhere: a free screen reader accessed via the

Hello Si

I don't think that converting to speech on the server is practical - not
beyond a research project; the computation penalty would be too great when
many users would use the site.  If some of the text is pre converted the
storage requirements would be enormous for each page.

On your second point, regardless of how clever the web engineering is,
whatever you do, connection is always unpredictable and many time slow due
to bottlenecks between the server and the client - on a home connection
anyway.

I suspect (but don't know) that the SA to Go converts to speech using a
local program downloaded to your computer which is I think a better
approach.

Regards
Isaac


-----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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INTERESTING ]--------------------------------------+
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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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