On Nov 14, 2010, at 6:53 PM, Matteo Belotti wrote: Hi list, I am creating an application based on gesture recognition. I would like to make it accessible, but i got only two solutions: 1) Read a single touch (as well as multitouch, like in standard method) while voiceOver is active. 2) Make voiceOver reading text while it is turned off.
Voiceover won't read text when it's turned off, but on osx (and I'd imagine on the ios devices as well) you do have access to the tts engine, and you could easily send the text you want to speak to the tts engine, and have it speak anyway, even if vo isn't turned on. Of course, you'd likely need to store speech settings such as rate, pitch, voice, and other settings voiceover users prefer, but if you make it clear that your appklication does not use voiceover or it's settings, perhaps folks wouldn't mind so much. However, I'll warn you now, that voiceover users are usually very picky about speech rate, and if you can't come close to the rate they prefer (I.E. I run fred at 100 percent, and still find it too slow) many folks won't bother with your app, because it's just too painful or slow to operate. Alex by default comes on talking at around 30 percent of it's full speed. If I had to use any application for an extrended amount of time at alex's default rate, I'd probably wind up throwing the device across the room, because it would just take too long to accomplish anything waiting for the speech to complete so I can go on to the next thing. I think you'll find that most people who have been using tts systems for 20+ years (as I have) can't/won't settle for slower speech output if they can operate in some other way and still get the information they need. It's just too time consuming to use speech to start with, and having to slow down because some developer won't honor the vo settings for their app would just mean your very target market will refuse to use your application.
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