Hello, I heard that some of you perhaps can't read the open letter. This could be the fact because you have turned on the automatic language recognition on your screen reader and your speech synthesizer tries to read the english letter with german pronunciation.
Here is the first section of the letter: Hello, I am Per from Germany and I want to inform you about the unique open source project Loadstone-GPS. Please excuse my english, it's not my mother tongue. The following could be interesting for the Corporate Responsibility and the public relations of the Open Handset Alliance and all the other companies & organisations with enough goodwill, vision and imagination. The main programmer of the Loadstone-GPS software, Shawn Kirkpatrick, and all the members of the Loadstone-team are blind and developers of a free and open source navigation software for blind persons like me. At present this program runs on Nokia S60 Symbian devices and is a great solution to make life for blind people easier. There is a growing worldwide community of users, testers and developers. This kind of selfhelp and working together in a global way is an absolutely new thing in this group, especially the free and open source idea. At the moment a lot of blind people around the world are using Nokia cell phones because there are 2 professional but expensive screen reader products for the S60 Symbian platform, Talks from Nuance Communications and Mobile Speak from Code Factory, which make these devices accessible by output of synthetic speech and also allow the use of third party software like Loadstone GPS. It would be desirable to have a screen reader software for the Android operating system too; the best solution would be an open source development, so blind people from the developing regions of our world have access to it as well, perhaps including the offer of an affordable, accessible and optimized mobile hardware. This device should have good tactile keys and a high-quality Loudspeaker And should be protected against moisture and dust. A display is not really necessary but there should be a connection port for a screen. A receiver of satellite signals, a compass and perhaps a gyro instrument could be Integrated or offered in an external wearable Bluetooth box. Additional hardware like a PC keyboard, a headset, a small external control, a portable Braille display, loudspeaker or a large Display For people with low vision could also be connected via cable or Bluetooth. Nokia, Google and other companies from the mobile tech sector could help to quicken the evolution of mobile internet access and navigation solutions for blind and visually impaired people around the world. Some of the members of the Open Handset Alliance perhaps have the knowledge and goodwill to program a free & open source Android program version with the Loadstone functionality and a free screen reader software or providing support/resources for that. Google's $10 Million Android Developer Challenge could also be an incentive for other developing teams. The Loadstone community will surely give all the needed information about user wishes and certainly many suggestions as well. A lot of the 37 million blind and 124 million visually impaired persons from all over the world will love the doer & companys for that! Especially the 1.4 million blind children below the age of 15. "Speaking" mobile technology is a great chance for them to obtain access to orientation, navigation, communication, education, learning and local based information & services. this will open new opportunities for the job market and for participation in social networks and in society, especially for those from the poor countries. The project "one laptop per child" could perhaps show the way for this idea and the operating system Android could open the door for the blind & visually impaired people. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Per" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 8:45 AM > Hi, > > my name is Per and I am from Germany. > I have written an open letter to Google, the Open Handset Alliance and > also > to Nokia. > > http://de.mini.wikia.com/wiki/Open_letter_initiative > > It's about the Loadstone GPS Project and also about an open source screen > reader for the new open source operating system Android for mobile > devices. > Android was financed and developed by Google and the other companies from > OHA. > What do you think about this? Any suggestions? > If you like the idea you could perhaps help me by posting this link to > english speaking blind or developer communities. > > It would be nice if some blind and seeing software developers could form a > global team of volunteers to develop a first version of an open source > screen reader. > Then the surely will win $25000 from the first part of Google's $10 > million > Android Developer Challenge. > I am not a developer or professional and so I search for them and try to > bring them together. > > With best regards from Germany > > Per > > To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
