Posts Tagged ‘visually impaired’

screen readers

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

Quite a while ago I listened to this great podcast about computer access for the visually impaired. Jon Udell interviews Susan Gerhart.  If you’re interested in finding out more about this, I would recommend listening to it.

One of the items she mentioned is an open source screen reader available from:

http://www.nvda-project.org/

I’m just about to download and install it myself. As I’m an auditory learner I want to see if it can read academic articles to me in the hope that I will be able to retain the knowledge better that way!

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screen readers & devices

Saturday, April 4th, 2009

Last year some time I listened to a podcast interview with Susan Gerhart. Susan has recently experienced macular degeneration and is using technology to help her maintain her quality of life.

To listen to the podcast, go to http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3715.html

Some points that I remember are:

  • How useful the Kindle (generation 1) has been for her. Later versions of Kindle had not been released yet at the time of this interview.
  • How useful screenreaders are and that she prefers to use computer-generated voices as you can speed them up and still understand them quite easily.
  • Some newspapers provide a specialised device that will read the newspaper contents to you daily.
  • She uses multiple mobile devices. Her PDA is extremely important to her.

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