Kindle 2: on the road to accessibility... or not

With the release of the 2nd version of the Kindle electronic book reading device by Amazon.com, it seems that the road to accessibility is up ahead. The (experimental) text-to-speech feature that is included in Kindle2 definitely is a good step in the right direction.

However, a recent concern that has been raised by the Author's Guild might add some complications for this rather important feature. If the Author's Guild is successful in its objections to a text-to-speech feature in Kindle2 (and possibly similar devices), what looks like a step towards accessibility may not end up where we hope it will.

Hopefully, a solution will be worked out that does not block users with significant visual impairments from ever being able to benefit from the functionality that Kindle provides.

Interesting inconsistency in JAWS

JAWS for Windows has long been regarded as one of the most commonly used screen readers on MS Windows (along with WindowEyes), especially in the US. Recently, while assisting someone with a JAWS for Windows install I noticed a very strange and illogical issue.

While making some global adjustments to the voice settings, I noticed that while the visual presentation of the global adjustments window shows a numeric value for the speaking rate, the spoken feedback while changing the rate was reflecting a percentage.

When you consider that even a company like Freedom Scientific fails to provide consistency in the auditory rendering of its own screen reader software, it is no surprise that accessibility issues with software are so common. It also shows that a basic rendering of controls is not sufficient in terms of making a user interface accessible. The semantic meaning of the control is important as well.

My experience with JAWS was surprising to say the least.

Still a long way to go...

Today the TV shopping channel QVC is holding a sweepstakes in honour of their 22nd birthday. Throughout the day, they show a "lucky number" on the screen and you can go to a specific website to enter the lucky number along with your telephone number.

Unfortunately, although QVC generally does a very good job describing products, announcing prices, etc... they choose not to have someone actually "speak" the lucky number as it is shown (or afterwards). As a result, although QVC is generally quite popular with blind customers, those same customers are now unable to participate in the sweepstakes. This makes for a rather unfair sweepstakes. And it would have been so easy to avoid this problem...

Universal access still faces major hurdles if even basic things like this QVC sweepstakes is done in a way that is not accessible to a group of customers. And again, the overall benefit to the entire customer population was overlooked as well. Obviously, even sighted customers would have been able to benefit from having the lucky number announced verbally, e.g. when someone needs to tend to something so that they are not able to see the screen but may still be able to hear the TV.

Sadly, an opportunity lost shows just how far we are from being able to see universal access in a more mainstream manner.

Virtual MacOS X on KVM

I came across this rather interesting webpage:

http://alex.csgraf.de/self/?part/projects&...s/id=Qemu%20OSX

It is mostly interesting because it results in a pretty speedy MacOS X install (albeit virtual) on pretty much any PC hardware, although it is of course against the EULA to run it on non-Apple hardware. But theoretically, there is no reason why this wouldn't work at all.

The patches that are provided at that site do need a bit of tweaking to get them to apply against the latest KVM release. I'll try to find a place to make them available for download, since I already did the forward-porting work anyway.

There are some things that do not work right, like the 'About my Mac...' application. I also haven't really tested sound just. Networking works perfectly, which is the main thing in my case anyway.

Due to issues with mouse pointer handling between vncviewer, QEMU's VNC server, and mouse acceleration handling between host and guest system, quite annoying discrepancies between mouse pointer positions happen. But... Since MacOS X (at least Leopard) includes a remote desktop feature using VNC anyway, you can just enable that, tell QEMU to redirect a host port to the VNC server in Leopard, and you end up with access to the virtual Leopard without mouse issues :)

Apple accessibility efforts

For a while, Apple has been criticized from various angles about the somewhat limited accessibility efforts that went into their products. While MacOS X has been accessible to visually impaired users through their (included) voiceover screen reader, other products used to suffer from various limitations (iTunes, the iTunes store, iPods, ...)

However, that is now changing...

Information about the various efforts that Apple has put forth towards true accessibility can now be found at a specific set of webpages found at http://www.apple.com/accessibility. As can be seen there, amongst other important news, a new generation of the iPod nano now offers spoken menus (including text-to-speech rendering of artist names, album names and song titles - created in iTunes and sync'd to the iPod as audio clips that are used in the spoken menus). It also supports a larger font size setting for low vision users. The iTunes software also has been improved to support screen readers on Mac OS X and MS Windows. This is an important improvement because this has been a pain point for many users.

There is a lot more going on, and I expect we'll be seeing more improvements in weeks and months to come. As the user population reviews the offered products, we'll certainly learn more about the capabilities and limitations, and I fully expect Apple to step up to the plate to address user concerns to improve upon the current offerings. There is a commitment behind these recent events that cannot be ignored.

JSAPI implementation for Fonix DECtalk

For a while I have been spending a little bit of spare time on writing a Java Speech API (JSAPI) implementation for the Fonix DECtalk software speech synthesizer. Since it hasn't been my main focus, it took a while to get it going, but finally I can report that it is mostly working. I will be preparing an alpha source code release in the next week or so. More information will be available at the project page.

For those who are curious, impatient, or both... Feel free to browse the API specification (javadoc).

As far as implementation details, it is important to note that the speech synthesizer itself is to be controlled by a little server (written in C) rather than by means of JNI. The reason for this design is that the DECtalk uses threading that is incompatible with the threading provided by the JVM. That makes it impossible to use the DECtalk shared library from JNI.

Appeals court rules in favour of the blind on US currency

A federal appeals court has ruled that the US Treasury Department is violating law by refusing to issue currency that is readily distinguishable by blind and visually impaired people. This upholds a ruling from 2006 in US District Court. At issue was the claim that the failure by the US Treasury Department to ensure that US currency is readily distinguishable to the visually impaired constitutes a violation of the Rehabilitation Act, in as suit filed in 2002 by the American Council of the Blind. As stated by judge Rogers: "A large majority of other currency systems have accomodated the visually impaired, and the Secretary does not explain why U.S. currency should be any different."

Press coverage of this ruling can be found in various places, including CNN and Comcast.net.