Re: [Accessibility] Call to Arms

[Eric S. Johansson]

 On 7/26/2010 3:33 PM, Chris Hofstader wrote:
> cdh: I've used NaturallySpeaking on Windows and MacSpeech (a DNS based 
> dictation program for Macintosh) on a number of occasions. I admit their 
> recognition quality is pretty good but we can't go in and make them better or 
> add API calls we would like or let some of our scholarly friends try out some 
> new theory that might be a major step forward. With proprietary software, we 
> get what we get.

I agree. But remember, my first goal is to make it better for crips like me. See 
the following for a very nice API. Works both with Windows and NaturallySpeaking.

http://code.google.com/p/dragonfly/

> cdh: Meanwhile, Nuance is bound by a huge debt burden that came (of course) 
> from acquiring everything from ETI to Dragon to KESI to the Talx guys to 
> SpeechWorks to L&H to some Israeli speech synthesizer to virtually all OCR 
> companies aside from Fine Reader  business  and lots more. While they have 
> incredible market share in most of their business segments, they are laying 
> off high priced hackers and hiring commission based salespeople and are 
> spamming all of we old customers on at least a weekly basis so they can catch 
> up with their interest payments. A lot of their employees are looking hard for 
> other gigs as they can feel the place going bad and I've even heard rumour 
> that ETI might be spun off into the good old Eloquence only company that made 
> the de facto standard speech synthesizer for screen readers.

This raises an interesting opportunity. If it does come to the point of 
collapse/sell off etc., one might be able to successfully argue to the 
bankruptcy court of this product is too valuable to disabled people to lose. 
That the Court should have the rights to it over to some appropriate 
organization for management and development. I'm willing to bet that the free 
software foundation could be either such organization or a supporter of 
especially for GPLed everything.

The other thought is that maybe, if somebody has contacted IBM speech 
recognition, maybe they could cut loose the old ViaVoice which is still used in 
some circles. It's not up-to-date with technology but it should be usable.