NVDA Project: a Screen Reader by the people for the people:

http://www.nvda-project.org/

As far as the computer screen readers go, the JAWS from Freedom Scientific has become something of an absolute standard. Last time I checked, a copy of JAWS standard version costs $895 - in case the irony escapes anyone, that is approximately the amount of a supplemental Security Income Check for the month. - I wonder when they are going to make the next shark movie.

So, when two blind computer programmers did not want to pay that kind of money for computers to talk, and reasoned, rightly, that others probably don't want to pay that kind of money to make the computer talk either, they wrote their own screen reader and very generously made it an open source.

In case readers don't know what an open source is, it's something I'd hate if I work for Microsoft, but I don't, so I absolutely adore open source software. Anyone can download, modify, use, copy, pass along, so long as nobody makes any money on it. So IVONA just downloaded the thing, packaged it with their voice engine and voila! They have an accessibility pack. But wait, didn't I say that nobody is supposed to make the money off the screen reader? Well, the screen reader is free, but the voice engine is not, so you get the picture.

NVDA screen reader comes with its own voice engine, but I could barely understand anything it says. It's like hearing myself in a tape recorder, wonder why anyone would model the voice engine after me. So that voice engine had to go. Luckily the two programmers don't have too much qualm about people changing voice engines. So I used IVONA Emma II British English Voice Engine on NVDA, the result is promising enough for me to want to tell you about it. Now that I have told you about it, it is your turn to download and see or hear for yourself.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CoWriter and the Subscription model:

The CoWriter Universal:  The Subscription model: When it comes to Word Prediction Software; none is, perhaps, better marketed than CoWriter by Don Johnston. Like Dragon Naturally Speaking by Nuance is for speech recognition, CoWriter by Don Johnston is often the first thing an AT professional think of when Word Prediction is being discussed.  In case there is still anyone out there that doesn’t know what a Word prediction software is, it’s what we often use when we type on the smartphone and other mobile devices. The little bar above the smartphone keyboard that guesses what we are trying to type is called, Word Prediction; and before the advent of the smart devices and their touch screens, Word Prediction Software had already been widely used by people with disabilities to make typing less of a pain. I first saw CoWriter on ABC News in early 2009, and its selling point was the copious vocabularies it is capable of predicting. It could be used by anyone from K12 to Po...
Read more

Simple Speech, affordable AAC software for Windows Platform

http://www.palsoftwaredesigns.com/ When I first came across their website, I was a little apprehensive, because it has neither the company's physical address nor telephone number. It only has a paypal sign for credit card payment, the name of its CEO, Jose A. Oritz, and a rather vague statement that the company is based in Brooklyn New York. True, many small companies that produce softwares aiming at niche market tend to use this model to minimize operating expenses - and trust me AAC software definitely qualifies as a niche market, Paypal payment and direct download afterwards, no mess, no fuss. But then, most companies do at least give their physical address and telephone number to give an impression of legitimacy, even fraudulent websites give that much. So readers cannot blame me for being over cautious. To cut a long story short, I took a chance, and bought a copy for testing. It works very much like proloquo2go from assistware and dynavox's mighty mo; it also comes wi...
Read more

The transformers come!

                                             While there has been little exciting news in the realm of high-tech consumer electronics other than the soul-eating-time-devouring-productivity-killing Pokemon Go sometimes masquerading as therapeutic app for people with agoraphobia, and, more generally, a cure for most Americans' aversion to outdoor exercises; the iPad got faster and bigger, and not to be outdone, Samsung sported an enormous 20 inch Android tablet called Samsung View; The bloated Android tablets, of course, have been with us since 2011, with Viewsonic's Smart Monitor and HP's all-in-one Android Computer. However, with the popularity of carbon fibre and other metal alloys, there has been a welcoming move by the Durable Medical Equipment (DME) industry to make traditionally bulky and heavy devices more mobile and portable. ...
Read more