Sound design
Deaf folks used to get pretty much a free pass through the Internet, since there was minimal sound-only content. This changed with innovations such as podcasts. Now audio has become ubiquitous enough that people are starting to look at recommending techniques for indexing and navigating information for a modality that is presented in a strictly linear fashion. We haven’t yet been able to access the full article, but we’re curious to know whether these techniques will involve any speech-to-text conversion, and whether this text can be exposed at least for Deaf individuals and anyone who benefits from simultaneous audio and visual presentation.
Presentment or resentment?
E-presentment is a fancy term referring to “the process of delivering traditionally paper-based documents online in electronic formats,” focused on the mainstream audience. Automatic boon for screen reader/text reader users? Not necessarily; the presentation is likely to be in PDF, which is at best iffy for speech output compatibility, or TIFF, which speech output can’t access at all. Strikes us that with just a little more thought, e-presentment could be a major accessibility service rather than just another barrier.
TechNewsWorld: The Vital Role of E-Presentment in Online Self-Service
Talk to new iPhone, and it talks back
The slate of features for the new iPhone 3GS has a few items that caught our attention–primarily voice control and voice output. The latter will be great for people with learning disabilities, but still not useful for blind folks until TV Ramen’s ideas are implemented.
Life is tweet
OK, you’re faced with that time-honored choice: get in your car and drive to work, or continue to follow and update your friends on Twitter. OnStar is thinking of eliminating the dilemma by creating a function that lets you create tweets using voice recognition and retrieve them using text-to-speech output. If this could be implemented outside the auto environment, it could allow people with visual and dexterity disabilities to be as mundane as the rest of us.
Google gaggle demo steno
Yet another disruptive Google service, for voice communications. Two years ago Google bought GrandCentral, the call routing and answering service that let you coordinate all your phone lines and devices and manage them by schedule, by caller, etc. GrandCentral has just re-opened as “Google Voice”, with all the old features and a few new ones. For example, voice messages are transcribed by default. Deaf users will not need to do back-flips to get spoken messages in text form, and other users may take advantage of such a feature to help manage their days and to-do lists. The fact that Google Voice is free leads us to wonder if they’ll be massaging our messages the way they do with our Gmail and Google searches. Available now only for existing GrandCentral users; open enrollment “in a matter of weeks”.
Google Voice: Google Voice Emerges from GrandCentral, Transcribes Voicemail
TokTok offers in-call speech recognition for web info
A new offering from Ditech Networks will allow you to access online information like calendars and social networks, just by saying the trigger word “TokTok”. No technical details on how this works, or what phones and networks it will work on. But folks, this may be a serious step forward for accessibility. If we can get voice controlled access to information on a portable device for a reasonable price, can Triple-Stuffed Oreos be far behind?
Fantasy in Promptu
Promptu is the first iPhone app to allow users to dictate text messages, edit them for accuracy, and then send them. Great for people with impaired ability to use the keyboard and/or with learning disabilities, and might help save eight-year-olds’ thumbs, too.