A year ago I started to evaluate FireVox 2.6 and had a dialog with Charles Chen, its creator. At that time there is no way I would describe it as "full-fledged screen reader" as it had many shortcomings. I got the impression it was really just a hobby project, and Charles said he had pretty much abandoned it in order to work on more interesting stuff. I see it is now up to version 3.4 so it will be interesting to see how it has progressed.
It was certainly usable, but it bears no comparison with a professional screen reader like JAWS, which is a far superior product. OK, it should be for $1500 but people should not think that they're getting a $1500 product for free when they install FireVox. It's more akin to products in the $200 price bracket. One example of the difference is in forms where <label> elements have not been used, and let's face it, that's 99% of all forms. JAWS applies heuristics to identify the text that is most likely to be the label, and associates it with the form control as if a <label> element had been used. 9 times out of 10 it gets it right. FireVox does not do this. Steve -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nick Lo Sent: 05 December 2007 04:25 To: [email protected] Subject: [WSG] Article: "Vocalize Firefox" (text-to-speech extensions for Firefox) I'm wondering if anyone has tried/tested the following potentially useful extensions and if so what their opinion was/is: "Two recently released text-to-speech extensions can transform Firefox into a talking Web browser suitable for users with visual impairments -- and anyone else who can use a speech interface to the Web. Fire Vox is designed to be a full-fledged "screen reader in a browser," usable for daily browsing even for unsighted users. CLiCk, Speak provides point-and-click screen reading, which can be helpful for partially-sighted users or sighted users who have written language difficulties (such as dyslexia)." http://www.linux.com/feature/122197 Nick ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ******************************************************************* ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ******************************************************************* ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
