Hi Michael,
Well, one of the major reasons why Windows comes with Narrator, Mac OS
with Voiceover, and Linux with Orca has to do with Section 508. In 2001
the U.S. American Disabilities Act, ADA, was amended so that all
software purchased by or used by the U.S. government had to meet certain
accessibility standards. Soon after George Bush Jr. signed Section 508
into law several small to large software companies began developing
access technologies in order to meet Section 508 compliance.
Although, Windows was the closest to meeting the requirements Microsoft
began expanding the number of applications for Windows that would aid in
accessibility. Out of that came Narrator, Microsoft Speech Recognition,
and Microsoft Magnifier. Certainly Zoomtext, Jaws, or Dragon were far
more advanced than what Microsoft was offering, but they had to include
those features to the OS to meet Section 508 compliance.
Apple quickly followed suit with their own Section 508 program. They
hired developers who worked on screen readers to build Voiceover, and
completely updated Cocoa so that new apps using Cocoa would
automatically be accessible out of the box. Even better by Mac OS 10.4
you could even install the entire OS from start to finish using
Voiceover which is still something you can't do with Windows, but
because Apple took a different approach to accessibility, by
centralizing it, Apple's accessibility has quickly caught up with
Windows and even passed it in certain areas.
Besides the top two companies smaller companies like Sun got into the
act as well. Sun hired a company from Germany to create a cross-platform
screen reader for Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD called /Gnopernicus. In
addition they paid developers to write a totally new accessibility
framework for Gnome which continues to this day. After a couple of years
Gnopernicus was dropped in favor of a newer screen reader written in
Python called Orca, and more and more open source developers have
consistently attempted to spend time on making their apps Section 508
compliant for Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris.
For example, KDE, which is another GUI for Linux, has been working on
accessibility for the last couple of years. Right now they have created
an API called qt-at-spi which acts as a bridge between any Qt
application for KDE and at-spi, which in turn passes the information to
Orca. All of this effort is do to Section 508 which passed 11 years ago,
and has been driving accessibility of software ever since.
As far as TTS goes that's a separate issue. There are several
non-accessibility related applications for TTS voices that has nothing
to do with Section 508, screen readers, or the uses we tend to use them for.
For example, Nextup has a couple of apps for Windows such as News Aloud
and Weather Aloud. The former reads the current news and the other
speaks the current weather. While they are accessible to us they were
not created or marketed for the blind community but for business men who
want to just listen to the news or weather without having to sit down
and read it. Speech output can be just as helpful to them as us in cases
like that.
Another use of TTS is telephone applications. If a person calls into an
automatic billing department they might be greeted by a program using a
Sapi voice that tells them to press 1 for English and 2 for Spanish.
Then, ask him/her for their billing number. It reads the current billing
number and asks if it is correct etc. It might then ask him/her if they
want to make a payment and so on. Basically, this is a technology that
has evolved independent of us and just because you hear a TTS voice at
your local teller machine doesn't always mean its there because of us.
Its often being driven by mainstream marketing trends.
Which brings me to my final point. While there are definitely six
billion people in the world and its expected to double over the next
century the fact of the matter is blindness is less than one percent of
the population. Then, when you divide that one percent up into groups
like the elderly who often live in assisted living conditions to begin
with and young men and women in our age range we end up with a very very
small group who use computers, smart phones, DVD players, etc. When you
face the facts you and I are are in a very small group who don't have
the kind of numbers to make it financially viable for certain products
to be made accessible.
Cheers!
On 3/14/2012 7:30 PM, Michael Gauler wrote:
Ok, let's think about this the other way around:
Then if it is not in the companies interest to make DVD players or
other devices accessible due to financial reasons, why does Windows
have Narrator and Mac got VoiceOver included into the operating systems?
If it is (theoretically) not a good idea because you won't make money
with it?
And while we are talking about market size. There are somewhere over
six billion people on earth. How many of them are blind or or have
other impairments?
I only hear that our community is small but what is the actual size
and do such statements about a small market include the world outside
of the USA?
I am not sure here, but most audio game developers are situated in the
USA, correct?
But no one seems to be asking if there are people outside of that
region of the world, at least that's the way I see it.
I am from Germany and regardless of how many developers my country
has, even here are some people who have bought some audio games or
have played the free ones.
I have the unregistered version of BGT to play several free games
created with it.
I was there from the time of TopSpeed 1.1A up to the latest version of
it.
I also was there when the Alchemy version of Montezuma's revenge was
first released.
The point is, that we have an unknown number of people scattered
around the world.
And about speech technology and accessibility:
If making devices accessible is not profitable, why does every major
company developing TTS voices state that their products are used for
embedded devices, automotive applications, phone call centers or for
automatic teller machines?
I went back to the town where I was born a few weeks ago.
I found out that announcements of bus stops for public transport was
changed to a German TTS voice instead of using the voices of several
radio moderators and voice actors.
Said TTS voice can be found in the program called Voice Reader.
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