Re: Screen readers and how to develop them: A historical perspective
- From: Alex Midence <alex.midence@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:04:49 -0600
sorry abt typos. Wonkey l key.
On 12/20/10, Alex Midence <alex.midence@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Glad you liked it. I was hoping someone on this list would have
> personal recollections of this time and the tech available. Neat how
> there was braille output as far back as the 50's. It's a shame that
> that stuff is stil as expensive as it is. Perhaps, some day, as
> happened with speech technology, blind people will see the price of a
> braille display drop to something affordable as in, under a thousand
> dollars? Same for a braille printer/embosser. I am enormously
> concerned at how many of the blind kids I have met recently have poor
> braille reading skils and don't really seem to care that they are
> bordering on illiteracy. Having something or someone read to you is
> not the same as direct input from a written document to your mind
> without an intermediary. In this age of electronic texts, you would
> think that braille would explode in popularity since you no longer
> have to fill a room with tomes of the stuff.
>
> Alex M
>
> On 12/20/10, Rasmussen, Lloyd <lras@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> That was fascinating. Dr. Stoffel worked at NIH for a period after he
>> wrote
>> that article. I could go on and on about this ancient technology, but
>> had
>> better do it off-list.
>>
>> People had produced braille from computers since the 50's. The first
>> speech
>> for a blind computer user was for Jim Willows, an engineer at the
>> Lawrence-Livermore Laboratories in 1968 (letters and numbers played out
>> through a digital-to-analog converter).
>>
>> The context of this article ... Votrax devices had been on the market
>> for
>> several years, but the SC-01 chip was put into the Type 'n Talk in 1981.
>> This device had built-in letter-to-sound rules, so you didn't have to
>> send
>> phonemes to it as you did the earlier V S A and VSB boards. These three
>> devices took RS-232 data and either acted like terminals or interpreted
>> terminal sequences and sent the data along through another serial port to
>> be
>> displayed. They were not screen readers running on the computer whose
>> screen was being read. It was revolutionary to think that you could buy
>> a
>> $300 Type 'n Talk instead of a $5,000 talking terminal to speak the data
>> coming from an RS-232 device. The Echo II synthesizer (using the T I
>> technology) was added to the Apple II at about this time. By the end of
>> 1983 there were screen readers for the Apple II and for the IBM PC.
>>
>> I worked a little bit with the FSST-3 and the VERT terminal, and heard
>> Deane
>> Blazie demonstrate the TotalTalk at various conventions.
>>
>>
>>
>> Lloyd Rasmussen, Senior Project Engineer
>> National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
>> Library of Congress 202-707-0535
>> http://www.loc.gov/nls
>> The preceding opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of
>> the Library of Congress, NLS.
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Alex Midence
>> Sent: Monday, December 20, 2010 3:24 PM
>> To: programmingblind
>> 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
>> __________
>> View the list's information and change your settings at
>> //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
>>
>>
>
__________
View the list's information and change your settings at
//www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
Other related posts:
