Thread Subject: Re: General Issues: Speech interfacesandequivalent facilitation

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From: Robinson, Norman B - Washington, DC
Date: Thu, Jan 18 2007 3:00 PM

Andi,

My thoughts are I've seen this in a certain PDF reader and in
certain eLearning software. All the implementations I've seen have
problems. They simply don't provide full access. Furthermore they
typically do not work well with Assistive Technology, interrupting the
use of AT and thus not in Section 508 compliance on that issue alone.

I think the vendors should be using the existing operating
system interface where available. This supposes the operating system
provides such an interface, which is expected in most implementation for
consumer desktop operating systems and I think reasonable.

My personal experiences on this matter are that we should avoid
such an approach as it increases the burden on the purchasing agent to
identify the accessibility issues and increases the burden on the
developers to duplicate the same resources that might already be
provided in the operating system.

Regards,


Norman B. Robinson
Section 508 Coordinator
IT Governance, US Postal Service
phone: 202.268.8246


-----Original Message-----
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Subject: [teitac-websoftware] General Issues: Speech interfaces
andequivalent facilitation



Speech interfaces are being incorporated into some applications
seemingly
replacing the need for screen readers. This typically is not equivalent
to
the functionality of screen readers and normally does not interface with
refreshable Braille displays. It does, however, meet the functional
performance criteria (31(a)) to provide at least one mode of operation
and
information retrieval that does not require user vision (assuming other
necessary features such as keyboard operation, etc.).

Thoughts on this topic?

Andi

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