John said: > and natively spoken language is always going to be the most > efficient means of communication. Andreas said: Not true, although the question really has nothing to do with the questions I've asked in this thread, which were related to scripting. Besides, we use a speech based interface in our tool. Rouben and Terveen, for example, found in their 2007 empirical study that sonification was actually more effective than speech based audio for certain types of tasks (Navigation). Speech effectiveness is highly variable and depends upon the context under which it is used, the word choice, proficiency with the language, prosodic cues (Think Robert Stevens work), not to mention cognitive issues in the brain (Williams disease affects spatial cues, for example, which limit your word choices for that group - Think baddeley's work), and of course, whether speech is happening in parallel. Even listening to a news broadcast while using speech cues, as they showed in an empirical study in Madrid this summer, can lower the comprehension of speech cues. Comprehension of speech is extremely complex, and whole books, like Paul Whitney's 1998 book "pscyhology of language," have been written on the topic. Here's the Rouben reference: Rouben, A., & Terveen, L. (2007). Speech and non-speech audio: Navigational information and cognitive load. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Auditory Display. and the madrid reference: Tsujimura, S., & Yamada, Y. (2007). A study on the degree of disturbance by meaningful and meaningless noise under the brain task. In 19th International Congress on Acoustics. The stevens reference: Stevens, R. (1996). Principles for the Design of Auditory Interfaces to Present Complex Information to Blind People. Ph.D. thesis, The University of York. Not sure why I deserved the negativity for asking straightforward questions. Andreas __________ View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind