RE: Screen readers and how to develop them: A historical perspective
- From: "Rasmussen, Lloyd" <lras@xxxxxxx>
- To: "programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:01:48 -0500
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
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