When text messaging first burst onto the scene, I thought, "Well, I'll never do that." I did briefly picture a strange parallel universe where mobile phone users, sick of tapping tiny keys, spoke into their phones that converted their voices into text messages, and then would send the text message to another phone which would, in turn, read the message aloud in a Robby-the-Robot voice. Luckily for society at large, we have not yet reached that level of laziness.
Still, texting has become one of the most common forms of communication, and those of us who live between the world of the visually perfect and the completely blind (who have Braille devices for texts) face a dilemma. On the one hand, we want to participate in the world as somewhat normal people, and normal people send out the occasional text. On the other hand, if we send out a text message (which is relatively easy), people might get the wrong idea and text us back. We're left with a tiny message on an electronic screen, and if we don't happen to have a CCTV or a friend who can read it, we're momentarily illiterate. Plus, these things are supposed to be private, right? What to do?
Well, for starters, there's technology. The problem is that technology for people like us moves very slowly. Many of my friends have made the perfectly logical assumption that my phone can read texts aloud, just like my PC at home reads documents and web pages. It does not. I'm not entirely sure such a product exists. If it does, please post something about it - I'd be suriosu to look into it. All I could fins on the web were people asking of such a product exists... a lot of them... which seems to indicate that there's a market.
The biggest surprise to me is that, of all companies, Apple seems to be ahead on this one. They've added their VoiceOver program to the iPhone, an they have a pretty good zoom too. I don't happen to own one, and it's hard to test it out in stores, but at least they're trying.
iPhone Vision Accessibility
For the moment, though, I am mostly texting-incapable. It's not high on my priority list, but it does seem like a pretty easy gap to fill. So what's the deal, phone makers? Low vision product manufacturers? Get on the ball. When you figure things out, send me a text.
Or not.
If we miss the point, the point's too small.
7 comments:
Your first message is funny because I signed up for Google Voice precisely because I wanted more text and less voice (GV tries hard to convert voice messages to text).
But the conversion is so bad that I had to listen to the voicemail messages I was trying to avoid in order to understand what the hell the text messages meant. So I gave it up.
So in the absence of a low vision solution, what about Braille literacy? Why not use the devices for the "completely blind"? Aren't they more accessible than the devices for the visually perfect?
(FYI: Nokia and Samsung European phones have text to speech support, and you might check out AfterVoice.)
BlackBerry has an application you can use that converts voice to text. Kind of like the Ford Sync of the phone world. It was never perfect, especially if you were trying to say and thing more complex then "Hi.How are you?" However, I never tried to have my BlackBerry read my text messages.
I currently have a the LG Envy 2 and it does read text messages that you receive. It does not read text messages that you are sending or convert voice to text.
Wow... Nokia, Samsung, and LG. Handy.
How many of these phones have you actually tried? How audible is the text-to-speech for incoming text messages?
Voice-to-text is less helpful for me: like the two of you, I find that those programs usually don't work so well, and you spend much more time proofing/deciphering the garbled text than you would just by slowly typing it out. It would be very useful if the phone could read aloud the text you're about to send, though... Do you know if the Samsung or the Nokia phones do that?
I do have a very simple Samsung - their displays are just universally better than on other phones (brighter and sharper), and they allow you to type phone numbers in large fonts. Looks like the iPhone now has those advantages too.
I haven't used any of these phones, so I can't help there. But look at this:
"Android SMS Speaker version 1.0 is multi-lingual Text to Speech application that fetches incoming SMS and allows for play back, similar to a voice message system, and it’s easy to use.
Works with
Acer: Acer Liquid
HTC: HTC Nexus One, HTC Passion, HTC Tattoo
Lenovo: Lenovo LePhone
Motorola: Motorola Backflip, Motorola DEVOUR A555, Motorola Droid, Motorola Milestone, Motorola XT720 MOTOROI, Motorola XT800 Zhishang
Samsung: Samsung SCH-i899, Samsung SGH-t939 Behold II
Sony Ericsson: Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 / X10i
T-Mobile: T-Mobile G1, T-Mobile myTouch 3G"
http://store.morninpaper.com/product.asp?id=52008&n=Android-SMS-Speaker
On the LG Envy 2 it has a "Robby-the-Robot" voice which can make it garbled. And it does not read abbreviations well or when someone leaves out apostrophes. Not incredibly helpful but it can be quite entertaining to listen to. Oh...you also have to have your ringer volume above vibrate or it won't read the text.
Funny, I came across this blog looking for accessibility apps for my Moment. Technology can make it so we have a flashlight on our phones, but not so the blind can read texts? Puhleese.
I've heard so many wonderful things about the iPhone 3GS and it's low vision friendliness. If only I wasn't too poor to afford at&t, I'd be all over that.
It's something I noticed when I was a kid, looking for low-vision solutions back then: technology moves slowly when it comes to accessibility. The internet has been a vast improvement, but I still have friends who design pages that are impossible to navigate without perfect vision - and that just means they aren't taking advantage of the tech that already exists. Research and development are a whole other level of effort.
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