There are actually a few different choices for enlarging stuff on the screen or having the contents read by the screen. These range from free, pre-installed with the operating system to downloadable demos to pricey enhancements with steep learning curves. The interfaces also range from modified mouse usage to entirely keyboard-based and mousefree. Choices depend on a person's need and the software chosen. These choices seemed interesting when I used to do tech support and could always help friends better than my colleagues who never engaged about the issue. Now, since the issues are more real in my own life, sometimes they are a pain in multiple parts of the anatomy. Mispronounciations are one example, though results vary by package used. Software will sometimes try to pronounce acronyms according to word phonetics rules and sometimes pronouce the acronym. Plenty of common terms also get mangled. Anything to do with looking for work will inevitably involve references to that biblical guy Job who somehow should not be capitalized. and the verb resume rather than the synonym for a CV. Heaven help you if you insist on using terms from a foreign language, either the ones that have come into English or passages in another language but not tagged to tell the software to use different pronounciation rules. And for real exotica, there is nothing like untagged bilingual text. Then there is the basic speed and reading capacity. Fast speech is about 180-200 words / minute; educated people reading print sometimes read print as fast as 300-400 words / minute. Some experience screen reader users can set the speed fast enough to sound like Alvin the Chipmunk and still understand content if they concentrate, but listening like that can be exhausting. Also there are a whole raft of Cognitive sci, UI, and content management issues one could always digress about, if one weren't already vexed by the reduced capacity issue or the linear, sequential, no easy way to skim problem or more interested in just trying to participate i normal dialogue about other topics such as the president-elect, FDR, TARP, GDP and whatever.
Screen readers CAN help a lot and make a huge difference, but their capabilities are like every ohter form of IT marketing hype I have ever been near: trust but verify; know the diference between the demo and what actually gets shipped / implemented,
As for capacity to generate tirades, I dunno about Carrol. I can come up with plenty to say but maintaiing quality in the form of minimal standards of research is, um, well would be better if I had a raft of grad students....
Enjoy.
DC
On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 5:06 PM, Bill Bartlett <billbartlett at aapt.net.au>wrote:
> At 4:30 PM -0800 16/11/08, Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
> Holy shit. Never thought about that problem. I'll try to keep it in mind.
>> Unfortunately
>> I've just written a very long post using even more acronyms than
>> usual...Sorry to
>> say. The main method that I think gets around this problem is to space out
>> the
>> letters like O E O, rather than OEO. Tell me if that works.
>>
>
>
> Yes, that's better. Though not a good example. OEO pronounced as a word
> sounds the same as O.E.O. Guess there's only certain ways you can pronounce
> some combinations of letters?
>
> It seems to pronounce the letters if they are capitalised, or lower case
> with dots or spaces between letters, but as a word if written in lower case
> without any separation of the letters. Which makes sense.
>
> No acronyms typed in lower case ok folks. (Though it gets some right, like
> the preceding "ok". It must be a word in the dictionary.
>
> Its all very interesting a problem. I've never used this software before.
>
> The other thing is that the mind seems to process the information
> differently depending on whether its written language or spoken. I suppose
> there's a whole science to that, with associated acronyms.)
>
> Of course you do realise that these suggestions could result in Carrol's
> being able to increase his output of tirades? ;-)
>
> Bill Bartlett
> Bracknell Tas
>
>
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