Friday, November 11, 2005

Dyslectic Screen Reader

In order to see the difference between the current version of QTSaver and the future version I entered the words Kolan Melingo and here is what I got:

Old version:

http://www.jirs.org/jirs/jirs0058ap.html
1. Product Manager: Leon Paul
Kolan is the only Hebrew TTS solution, it is a screen reader that enables you to hear any computerized text (word documents, web pages, etc) Melingo specializes in Hebrew National Processing. Product includes: online Hebrew dictionary Rav Milim; Nakdan for automated voweling of Hebrew text; Kolan for automated reading of computerized Hebrew text; Morfix for Hebrew morphological internet and enterprise search solutions.
2. http://www.melingo.com/personal_kolan.htm
Melingo - Hebrew and Arabic natural language processing Personal Kolan
Kolan for Accessibility to the Internet Kolan's ability to automatically read text, provides web-site owners with a cheap and easy to use tool for making their sites accessible to the public that previously could not take advantage of the internet - the blind and visually impaired, dyslectics etc... Melingo has developed tools that enable web-site operators to automatically plant readings of the text in their sites, without the use of recording studios.
3. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2002JulSep/0335.html
Further to Judy's reference to our company, Melingo, which is a subsidiary of Britannica Israel, and the leader in Natural Language Processing for semitic languages & computational linguistics, has developed a Hebrew TTS engine - Kolan. Kolan is able to read hebrew texts with or without vowels at an extremely high degree of accuracy (average accuracy is over 98%).

New version:

1. Same as above.
2. http://www.melingo.com/ab.htm
Melingo has created solutions for automatic text to speech (TTS), a technology that enables unified messaging technologies with a Hebrew capability, and makes it possible for users to listen to documents, to e-mail messages, Internet pages, appointment books, etc. while commuting or driving a car, all in a human voice over the telephone. In addition, the Personal Kolan program has been developed for persons who are blind, visually impaired, dyslexic, or otherwise handicapped, to make it possible for them to hear any text displayed on the computer screen instead of having to read it, or to enable them to communicate with their surroundings.
3. Same as above
4. Same as above
5. http://www.melingo.com/kolan_ab.htm
Future KOLAN's morphological and syntactic analysis and disambiguation modules are applicable to languages where there is a problem of rich morphology and ambiguity , such as Arabic; Melingo plans to duplicate the success of KOLAN to such languages.

Another example: Search results for dyslectic screen reader.
New version:

1. http://archivist.incutio.com/viewlist/css-discuss/25738
http://www.wemedia.com/talking_browser.asp This one is different, as it's a talking browser, and you have to select the text you want it to read, mostly for low vision impaired and dyslectic.I find it useful to 'hear' the text before I run it through the Window-Eyes application. This one is completely free and doesn't require a restart/reboot. 2.
2. http://www.jmk.su.se/global99/access/design/desitxt.html
Many screen reader programs used by visually impaired and sometimes dyslectic people are not up-to-date enough to work compatibly with other software. If you use PDF-files try to provide text only versions if possible.
3. http://www.nr.no/dart/multifunk/wwdu2002-abstract.html
Colour and contrast is said to be important especially for dyslectic readers. We provide colours suggested by associations for dyslexia. Finally, all text is left justified with a ragged right-hand margin.
4. http://www.icdri.org/CTC/community_technology_center_acce.htm
This is a screen reader for the Web to help blind, dyslectic, or vision impaired users.
5. http://www.elkshelp.org/software-but2.html
Software, "OMNI-3000" by Kurzweil, An in-color talking screen reader for the low-vision, learning-disabled & dyslectic users. Sentence being read is in one color, word being read is in another color.

Old version:

1. Same as 4 above.
2. Same as 2 above.
3. Same as 5 above.

Conclusion: in both examples number of result grew from 3 to 5 and the internal order of results was better on the new version.

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