RE: Accessible Blackberry?

All, Firstly thanks for all of your replies. As well, below is appended is a 
reply that I received from RIM regarding blackberry accessibility. You may find 
it of interest.
--- 
From: Accessibility Inquiries [mailto:Accessibility@xxxxxxx] 
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 7:27 AM
Subject: BlackBerry Accessibility Inquiry
Hello Peter, Thank you for your inquiry concerning the use of BlackBerry 
devices for a person who is blind.  Please note that BlackBerry devices 
themselves operate on the Java2 Micro Edition platform (J2ME) and screen 
reading applications for mobile phones do not currently support J2ME.  As such, 
BlackBerry devices themselves are not fully accessible by the blind.  We have 
entered into a strategic alliance with HumanWare to help build an alternative 
access solution for BlackBerry devices for our blind customers.  We just 
announced this relationship at the NFB Convention in Atlanta earlier in the 
summer and solutions will be commercially available some time in 2008.  More 
information will be made publicly available as applicable.
In the interim, BlackBerry customers with severe vision loss can take advantage 
of our BlackBerry Connect product offering.  This solution enables customers to 
experience BlackBerry push technology and leverage their existing BlackBerry 
infrastructure investment on 3rd party handsets from vendors such as Palm, 
Motorola, Samsung, Nokia and others.  Internally within RIM, we have conducted 
performance and usability tests with a number of these 3rd party handsets 
running BlackBerry Connect and 3rd party screen readers including TALKS, Mobile 
Speak and PocketHAL.  
Based on these tests, and ongoing customer feedback, we would recommend the 
following solution:
·       BlackBerry Connect for Symbian OS
·       Nokia E62 Smartphone
·       CodeFactory Mobile Speak Screen Reader or Nuance TALKS
For more information on this solution, please refer to the following additional 
resources:
* BlackBerry Connect for Symbian OS - 
http://na.blackberry.com/eng/devices/enabled/os.jsp#tab_tab_symbian 
* Business Case Study - BlackBerry Connect for Symbian OS - 
http://blackberry.com/products/pdfs/Symbian_CS_BBC_final.pdf 
* Nuance TALKS Screen Reader - 
http://www.nuance.com/talks/ 

·       Code Factory Mobile Speak - 
http://www.codefactory.es/mobile_speak/mspeak.htm 
·       Service (Rogers Wireless) - 
http://www.shoprogers.com/store/wireless/services/web_browsing/blackberry/blackberry_connect.asp
 
·       Service (Fido) - 
http://www.fido.ca/portal/domore/sdp_email_blackberry.jsp?lang=en 
I hope this information proves helpful.  Please let me know if you have any 
questions.
Cheers, BlackBerry Accessibility
accessibility@xxxxxxx 
http://www.blackberry.com/accessibility

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Quaiattini 
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2007 4:05 PM
To: 'programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'
Subject: Accessible Blackberry?

The DBA team that I am a member of is going to be using the now famous 
Blackberry to do pageouts and for severity 1 alerts. To the best of my 
knowledge, this technology is not accessible - does anyone have any information 
to the contrary or how the Blackberry can be made to talk?
Regards, Peter 


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