|
|
ONLINE FEATURES
Book Reviews
BW Video
Columnists
Interactive Gallery
Newsletters
Past Covers
Philanthropy
Podcasts
Special Reports
BLOGS
Auto Beat
Bangalore Tigers
Blogspotting
Brand New Day
Byte of the Apple
Economics Unbound
Eye on Asia
Fine On Media
Green Biz
Hot Property
Investing Insights
Management IQ
NEXT: Innovation
NussbaumOnDesign
Tech Beat
Working Parents
TECHNOLOGY
J.D. Power Ratings
Product Reviews
Tech Stats
Wildstrom: Tech Maven
AUTOS
Home Page
Auto Reviews
Classic Cars
Car Care & Safety
Hybrids
INNOVATION
& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip INVESTING Investing: Europe Annual Reports BW 50 S&P Picks & Pans Stock Screeners Free S&P Stock Report SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth 100 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 S&P 500 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs MBA Blogs MBA Profiles MBA Rankings Who's Hiring Grads | |
MARCH 16, 2004
By Alex Salkever Finally, Apple Speaks to the Blind [Page 2 of 2] EASIER FIT. Apple's decision to build Spoken Interface into OS X also hints at all sorts of promising possibilities. Jobs & Co. plans to freely offer "application program interfaces" (APIs) for its screen-reading modules to software developers. APIs are tools, rules, and protocols that guide a programmer in ensuring that new software works well with a specific operating system. Using open APIs (meaning anyone can look at them) should give Mac developers a relatively easy way to make their software work well with Spoken Interface. Compare that to the Windows world, where software developers have to submit their code to engineers at the two major screen-reader software makers -- then wait until those engineers tell them how to adjust the code to work with the screen readers. It's often an expensive and time-consuming process. Apple's aid to programmers goes even further. Bourden says if developers use Apple's Cocoa programming environment in writing their programs, they'll already have built in over 90% of the information required by Spoken Interface to make the program fully accessible. Already, he says, a lot of Cocoa-based software works with Spoken Interface without any adjustments to the underlying program code at all. "BETTER AND BETTER." Apple tested a well-known Cocoa-based shareware application, MacJournal, to see how it did with Spoken Interface with no modifications. "It was really neat. It worked pretty well right off the bat," says Bourden. So far, the reaction from the folks in the assistive-technology community who worked with Apple on Spoken Interface has been largely positive. "I think they're doing phenomenal work. I wouldn't say [that] it's better than [leading Windows screen reader] JAWS yet, but it could be. Each time they show me a new version, it gets better and better," says Larry Goldberg, director of the National Center for Accessible Media, a Boston (Mass.) nonprofit that develops assistive-media technologies and advises companies on how to make their products friendlier to people with disabilities. Ultimately, this is a case of doing well by doing good. Apple still garners 25% of revenues from education sales. And the folks at One Infinite Loop surely recognize that visual impairment will strike millions of baby boomers in the next few decades. That makes screen-reading technology essential if Apple wants to hang onto aging customers. READY TO TALK. What's more, the open-source community is building its own screen readers and accessibility software suites. If Apple had elected not to respond, it would have been the only major operating system not to offer accessibility tools for the visually impaired. Instead, Apple has taken a big leap -- and one that could pay off in unsuspected ways. In the long term, Spoken Interface could become a key part of how all sorts of people use computer. Many visionaries have predicted a time when interactions with computers will employ the most efficient and natural communication system people have: the voice. When Spoken Interface will actually roll out in a production version of OS X remains unclear. Apple says it'll probably go into the next upgrade, but Spoken Interface hasn't even entered the "beta" stage of development. COMMUNITY EFFORT. Still, the decision to go to the assistive-technology community for feedback is tremendous. Apple has traditionally put secrecy among its top priorities. In this case, that would have hindered rather than helped the effort. The only way to figure out whether a piece of software works for visually impaired users is to ask them at every step of the development process. I'm hopeful that Spoken Interface will prove the first step in the long process of winning back the visually impaired community's confidence, which had largely abandoned Apple a decade ago in favor of Windows machines with better screen-reading software. Hats off to Apple for doing the right thing and finding a solution relatively quickly that feels good and makes financial sense.
 Salkever is Technology editor for BusinessWeek Online. Follow his Byte of the Apple column, only on BW Online Edited by B. Kite
BW MALL
SPONSORED LINKS
Buy a link now!Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | |
 Copyright 2004, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.Terms of Use | Privacy Notice |
Printer-Friendly Version
