I've been a Mac user for a long time, but skipped the iMac and went to PC for gaming. I missed Apples, but dealing with the ridiculous problems in Windows 98 and above has definitely increased my technical proficiency, so I don't regret my Apple abandonment.
One thing that I've always loved about the Mac OS is speech. Windows has never and will probably never match the quality voice control that you can get with a Mac. A great thing to do when using a Mac is to set a keyboard shortcut for speech. While playing video games or working, you can select the text of a lengthy article and press Apple+Ctrl+Alt+S and read with your ears. Windows does not seem to provide this feature without expensive software. What's the point?
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
An Internet-style, daily web interface of knowledge and hygiene.
Is this your first visit to this page?
Twitter Twatter
Friends
Friendly Musicians
Free Advertising
Instant Pestering 2.0
About The Author
- Ryan de Burque
- I hail from Albuquerque, Alaska 213-42546-07598, South Georgia & South Sandwich Islands
- Ryan was one of the founding fathers of Internet. When Internet first started, Ryan's expertise was queried to make sure that every user had the best possible experience possible. You're welcome.
Labels
- Funny (17)
- Time Machine (17)
- Video (15)
- Monkeys (14)
- games (10)
- Me (5)
- Review (5)
- WebTV (5)
- Music (3)
- Rants (3)
- Tips (3)
- What's The Point? (3)
- computer (3)
- interesting (3)
- "Teh Internets" (2)
- Cats (2)
- Concert Review (2)
- News (2)
- Thoughts (2)
- Windows (2)
- lifehacking (2)
- Art (1)
- Comics (1)
- Firefox (1)
- Food (1)
- Friends (1)
- Memories (1)
- Movies (1)
- Poems (1)
- astronomy (1)
- gmail (1)
- nostalgia (1)
- photography (1)
- poetry (1)
- space (1)
Posts
2 comments:
MS Narrator shipped first in Win2k, and it's been in the product ever since.
The in-box OS X screen reader is better, but I understand it's not really heavy enough for the kinds of accessibility necessary for people who actually need it. Like, you know, blind folks.
Both companies really rely on independent software vendors to fill out this functionality, likely because accessibility systems like these are difficult to build in a way that's useful, generic, and doesn't overwhelm the rest of the OS.
Apple put more of it in the UI layer and sucked up a keyboard shortcut. MSFT put more of it into the software platform and let ISVs party on it. Which was the better mix of investments? I don't really know.
--D
I am aware of Narrator, but it doesn't do what I need it to do. It seems semi-useful for blinds, but very annoying for the people with decent vision.
I haven't found a way to get narrator to read selected text. It just seems to read menu items and prompts. Even when I disable all the available options of what to read, it continues to read the title of the foreground window every time I select something.
I played around with it some more while replying and was able to get it to read what I wanted by pasting things in notepad, but multi-tasking is right out because it stops reading as soon as I select a different window. At least I can use it to read me stuff when I don't need to be using the computer.
The heavy third party aspect of text to speech programs, is probably why I can't find a decent reader for Linux.
The Apple reader is exactly what I need in a text to speech application. Unfortunately, there is only one Mac in my household and I rarely have access to it.
Post a Comment