Is your wife visually impaired? Just wondering how yesterday's technology, like this IBM unit, compares to what's available today (not that I know too much about it, but have heard a few mentions on various podcasts).
Yes. She uses the JAWS Screen Reader now and has for years, both for work (she's retired now) and at home. The IBM Screen Reader worked differently, as I recall, monitoring various parts of the screen for changes which it read out. The screen images were a lot simpler back in those days; but with all the windows and pop-ups today, that technology would no longer work. Today's screen readers rely on things like buttons and images that are labeled with alternate text or other predefined means, for example, and they don't require a separate keypad. They are far from perfect (they miss some popups, for example), but they make an amazing accessibility difference.
As an aside, she tried to switch from a PC to a Mac last year, in part because the screen reading software on the iPhone is very good and it's included (read free) on the Apple products. But the implementation on the Mac was terrible, written to a programmer's model of containers, entering and exiting areas of the screen, with inconsistent ways of moving around. She had t give up the Mac and return to a PC with JAWS.
