Hi folks, For those of us who were at the meeting last night this will seem like a natural progression, for those who were not, I get the feeling that some folks aren't sure what a screen reader is, and get it confused with a TTS function.
TTS, text to speech, is simply a function which takes a block of text and renders it through a speech synthesizer as spoken text. Often this text must be selected and identified as something the listener wants read. So, you are doubtless with a fun little toy which allows you to select a block of text in your word processor and then click a button to read it out loud. To a blind person, this i next to torture. How can I make the thing talk if I can't see to select the text? Enter a screen reader. A screen reader takes the information written to the screen, and coming from the keyboard and speaks it judiciously. For example, I can tell the screen reader to speak each new line of text written to a certain part of the screen, or to a particular program which may be off screen. I can tell a screen reader to read each word as I type it, each letter as I type, or nothing at all until I go back through the text, line by line, to proofread my work. A screen reader will read the controls on a screen. It will tell me if a checkbox is checked, if a button is pressed, if an item is selected. So the screen reader feeds relevant info to the TTS engine. I'm gonna leave off here because I don't want to bore people. I just wanted to explain this issue a little bit because I imagine it must be a little frustrating for people to know that a particular function is available, but not understand how exactly it could be put to use. Thanks for reading this! Rusty
