How fast can a blind person read?
November 3rd, 2009
You think you’re a fast reader?
You might change your mind after you listen to this recording (mp3, 4:12, 2.4MB) of a Civil War-era letter being read aloud by a "screen reading" computer application called JAWS.
The letter is one of the items in the rough draft of our "proof-of-concept" Omeka archive with an accessibility plugin (created by Cory Bohon with input from George H. Williams) designed to make navigation easier for the visually impaired.
We’ve developed a plugin for Omeka that allows a user with visual impairment to use “Access Keys” to navigate through the site by sound and memory, instead of viewing the menus and links visible on the screen. Our goal is to have a finished, working demonstration of this plugin installed on an Omeka archive of nineteenth-century documents by the end of Fall 2009. (We’ve chosen these documents simply because they were already digitized and available to us with metadata.)
In this mp3 recording, the enduser running JAWS is Marty McKenzie of the South Carolina School for the Deaf & Blind and the South Carolina Department of Education.
The other voices are Tina Herzberg, assistant professor of education at USC Upstate, and George H. Williams, assistant professor of English at USC Upstate.
The image, transcription, and metadata associated with the letter (and many other items) were generously shared by the archivists and librarians working with the Littlejohn Collection at Wofford College.
