I want more text to speech!

[karavite]

One of the really cool things about every Mac since the first one was text-to-speech. OS X has it, but the Finder doesn't have the same level of speech features that were present in OS 9 ( or 8, or 7 or even 6). Sure I can use TexEdit to have my Mac read to me (great for proof reading term papers when I was a grad student!), but I was really dissapointed to not see more text to speech options in Jaguar. I miss my talking dialog boxes! This wasn't a novelty - I really used it. It was very useful to have my Mac get my attention when a program needed attention, a large file was copied, sent...

Now, my PC can do this and more (W2k "Narrator" which is kind of cool - I hate to say), while my Mac does less than it did last year in OS 9! I don't want 3rd party apps for this - I want what I used to have - a friendly Mac that spoke to me!

In addition to satisfying people like me who feel audio and speech are under utilized interface components, more features like this will give the Mac some recognition in accessibility, something it paved the way for and sadly has dropped off to some degree - outside of K-12 - due to market forces and Windows dominance.

 

[karavite]

Replying to myself - how pathetic...

I guess it was in the small print all the time - at Apple's site on Jaguar - Universal Access it states:

"The system will also speak alerts, selected text and text underneath your mouse."

So, it seems they put it back in and them some - still, the Mac is way down the list of computers used by people who are blind. The screen maginfication and speech features will be useful to someone with low vision, but it's too bad nobody developed a really good screen reader for the Mac for people with more severe visual impairments. I used to work with people who are blind and using Windows screen readers like JAWS or WindowEyes on a PC is not easy - primarily because the Windows GUI (that is translated to speech by a screen reader) is full of poor usability and inconsistent UI components for everybody - it's bad enough when you can see it!

I look forward to having my Mac speck to me again.