I've been looking at options for a screenless wearable as well. A friend recently showed me her laptop designed for blind users -- it's a generic-looking subnotebook PC with some custom-looking text-based/speech-synthesis-based software for word processing, file management, etc. It's a window-like interface, the way screen-based DOS programs looked before the advent of MS Windows, and the spoken interface isn't that sophisticated, really. Moving the cursor up and down causes individual lines of text to be read (she's got it cranked up incomprehensibly fast, so reading a line of text isn't more than about a second), and cursor left-right motion causes individual words and punctuation to be read. When dialog boxes appear, their interior text is voiced, and tabbing from button to button causes the "yes", "no", "cancel", etc. prompt to be read. It didn't appear to be that hard to use. Sighted users will probably find it helpful to be familiar with the program on-screen, as Paul suggested. She's also been looking towards an upgrade, in part to be able to websurf. There are a number of screen-reader programs out there of varying levels of sophistication. Some of them also attempt to duplicate the screen appearance on Braille displays. http://www.microsoft.com/enable/catalog.htm lists about a dozen programs of this nature. Off of one of these links is mentioned a U. of Oregon(?)-hacked version of the GNU utility 'screen' which has support for screen reading. With Linux being the preferred OS, and 'free' being the preferred type of software, this might be an option to look into. (I'm not sure what sort of hardware/software support for speech synthesis is required, though.) nathan
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