[ossrp-control] Re: What Is A Screen Reader?

Hi Bryan,
Quite right about the speech vs braille preference. I guess it's the other way round for me. Though I started out with braille at school, Ive always preferred audio books overall and still am a pretty slow bhraille reader. As soon as I got a speaking Windows screen reader, I found speech being my primary output medium. Though I'm a foreign English speaker I seem to be able to comprehend English speech synths a lot faster than many of the native language speakers with years of practise. I guess my braille speed must be about half of the speech rate.

As to other media I use magnification for getting the big picture and homing in on bitmapped or otherwise inaccessible text. I'm using braille the least of the three but have found it valuable in detailed reading such as when survaying program code or doing math (though I sometimes also use magnification for this purpose). Braille is also good for quickly reading the changing bits in redundant content e.g. in a list of full paths the file name if the folder is the same for subsequent items. I guess optionally filtering out redundant bits of speech might also work e.g. only speaking the difference.

Lastly, I've seen tests that group people into visual, auditory and kinesthetic learners. I wonder if whether you are primarily auditory or kinesthetic correlates with the popularity of speech and braille.

With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/

bryan_dufelmeier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Rich, I don't know about brains being wired differently fut I think you
might also get different results if totally blind people who never had
sight were surveyed based on whether they were good braille users or
primarily used speech. I started my pc access with the versabraille and
didn't use speech at all until windows. I use braille as my primary means
of pc access and am finding that speech is mainly nice for slightly faster
access in some situations. However, having the info at my fingertips is
just so natural and effective that I could rellly give speech completely.
At work several years ago I was forced for a time to use speech and had
considerable difficulty my speed and therefore productivity went up
dramatically when I got a braille display. Directional navigation is fine
just make sure the layout info accompanies it. 

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