Thread Subject: Re: Cognitive - compatibility

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From: Peter Korn
Date: Tue, Mar 06 2007 5:55 PM

Hi Allen,

> Is there AT now that can allow the user to highlight a word in anything
> on screen and offer spelling and/or dictionary function?
> Ditto for reading out loud--but I'm sure this part is available.
>

Software like this used to exist for the Macintosh, a long time ago. It
was really quite slick.

To do this today, you would need to either have an off-screen model (and
all of the video hooks and reverse engineering implied by such) like
those in our screen readers, or be running on a system which provides
all of the text that is on the screen via a standard API. We're
starting to get there on the Macintosh. We're already there in GNOME
UNIX systems. But in neither place do we have such a utility.

Hmmm.... That'd be a good Google Summer of Code project for a summer
intern...

> Second, what are the underlying obstacles to such software beyond such
> things as scanned images of text?
>

Having a well-respected API for getting all of the text & text
boundaries from the apps running on the system.

> In other words if a software application meets the other existing
> software requirements now, will AT of this type generally work? If so,
> is this requirement redundant,, or do we want to require this be a
> built-in feature in preference to add-on?
>

I personally think this is the kind of feature that works best as a
separate utility - one user interface that works the same everywhere on
the desktop.


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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