- From: Anne Pemberton <apembert@crosslink.net>
- Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 11:45:54 -0400
- To: "jonathan chetwynd" <jay@peepo.com>
- Cc: "w3c" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Jonathan, At my first, the previous teleconference (4?) someone described the difficulty that CAST was having finding means of determining and labeling the reading level of text that was to be used in text to speech software. CAST has apparently learned that merely provide speech synthezation isn't all that is needed to make the web accessible to all visually impaired folks with normal hearing. CAST has discovered that various cognition levels in visually impaired folks will render text-to-speech pretty useless if the text being spoken is signigicantly above the cognition level of the user. If this is a problem for the visually impaired folks, who are presumed to have more or less "normal" cognition, how much greater then is the problem when we are talking about people with different or impaired cognition? Back with an early Apple IIe machine, I went out on a limb and bought a speech synthesizer for a visually impaired student with a very low IQ. Not only did my girl hate the synthesized speech (worse than she hated the talking books she got from the state), but it didn't enable her to use "normal" level materials for instruction either. Text to speech doesn't work for everyone we could hope it would, but I shudder to think of the consequences if it hadn't been developed. The speech synthesizer we had would only read text files from a disk, not from the Internet (although there really wasn't much K-12 content on the Internet back then except on mailing lists). Anne Anne L. Pemberton http://www.pen.k12.va.us/Pav/Academy1 http://www.erols.com/stevepem/apembert apembert@crosslink.net Enabling Support Foundation http://www.enabling.org
Received on Monday, 12 July 1999 17:11:24 UTC