Re: Screen readers and how to develop them: A historical perspective

I love historical fiction!
just kidding... i love historcal non-fiction, too. I lived in Stanford in the years of this article, but was never introduced to a speech terminal. I was sighted then, too, as were most of the people I knew when I was young, but WOW! Wish I would have been at the forefront of it then... 

Thanks for the fun knowledge,
David
----- Original Message ----- From: "Alex Midence" <alex.midence@xxxxxxxxx> 
To: "programmingblind" <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, December 20, 2010 12:24 PM
Subject: Screen readers and how to develop them: A historical perspective



Hi, all..

I thought this was rather interesting.  It is an article written in
1982 about some of the techniques used back then to write screne
readers or "talking terminals" as they called them.  I was struck by
some of the predictions the author made with regard to the future,
some of wich came true and others which did not.  There was also a
very interesting section on speech synthesis and how to get the
hardware and software to do many of the things we take for granted
nowadays like starting and stopping speech, repeating previously
spoken text, deciding what to say as an acronym and what to speak as a
word, punctuation levels and so forth.  It was fascinating stuff.

http://web.archive.org/web/20060625225004/http://www.edstoffel.com/david/talkingterminals.html

Oh yeah, and get a load of the prices for that stuff!  Keep in mind
that was in 1980's money too.  Put like a 33% markup on it and you
might approximate what it would cost in today's money.

Alex M
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