Kestrell

My first post on Medium! I'm writing under my real name: Kestrell Verlager--please follow me if you are on Medium and enjoy my writing about accessibility, disability, technology, and fan media.

Six Accessibility Technologies Built into Your Smartphone
https://medium.com/@kestrell/six-accessibility-technologies-built-into-your-smartphone-18b7836a84ec

1. It all began with Alexander Graham Bell's idea for the telephone, which grew out of his work with deaf people, including Mabel Gardiner Hubbard, the woman who would become his wife.

2. Next time you are texting your best friend, consider that one of the first typewriters was invented by Pellegrino Turri (1765–1828) for his blind friend, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano.

3. The touchscreen was developed by Wayne Westerman and John Elias, after Westerman developed repetitive stress disorder while writing his PhD. dissertation.

4. If you have ever used an app which let you take a picture of printed material and then run it through an optical character recognition (OCR) program to get a digital text version, this technology was invented by Ray Kurzweil to help blind individuals scan and read print materials.

5. The speech synthesizer was created by MIT professor Dennis Klatt, who was losing his own voice due to thyroid cancer. Klatt's computerize speech technology would go on to allow Stephen Hawking to share his brilliant ideas with the world.

6. If you use the Alexa app on your phone, before Amazon bought and further developed the Alexa virtual assistant, the text-to-speech program was owned by Ivona Software, and one of its applications was as a news reader for blind people in Britain.

Global Accessibility Awareness Day is on Thursday, May 19.

You may read and hear many articles and events which talk about making technology more accessible for people with disabilities.

Please take time to consider all the people with disabilities who have invented, tested, provided feedback and, last but not least, freely shared their own creative ideas and energy to develop the technologies you use every day.

Everyone benefits from making technologies more accessible.

Further reading:

Stephen Hawking’s voice, made by a man who lost his own
https://beyondwords.io/blog/stephen-hawkings-voice/#:~:text=While%20working%20on%20technology%20that,His%20voice%20lived%20on.

Klatt's Last Tapes - History of Speech Synthesis - Radio 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=097K1uMIPyQ

The Evolution of Assistive Technology into Everyday Products | Part of a Whole
https://incl.ca/the-evolution-of-assistive-technology-into-everyday-products/

Amazon buys text-to-speech software company Ivona Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-ivona/amazon-buys-text-to-speech-software-company-ivona-idUSBRE90N0T020130124

Kes: I like that this article by Motherboard gets into the larger implications of how this affects women in technology, but I'm always surprised that no one ever comments that these voices are not just feminine, they are ultra-feminine, and sometimes, such as the voice for the elevator that was in the hotel where WisCon used to be hosted, even sounded like a Stepford wife on valium, wich really creeped me out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBlPxpaum6U

I am still piecing together fragments of Greek poetry, although I did recover enough sanity to ask Alexx if he would visually proofread the text at some point, because I'm only on page eighty.

What I heard:
38 Loving girls more than Jell-O.

What is actually printed in the text:
38 Loving girls more than Gello.

Today's NY Times has a second installment in a series of articles about how mainstream tech is being adopted and adapted by PWD. The subject of today's article is text-to-speech
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/text-
to-speech-technology-reaches-an-inflection-point/?partner=rss&emc=rss