cox and accessibility

[der.hans]

Am 14. Mar, 2002 schwätzte Todd Hought so:

> Well, while Cox is in fact not regulated by any sort of reasonable laws on
> utility companies, you might be able to get them another way.
> When I first saw your post on accesibility, my first thought was of the
> ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), which many sites adhere to.

That's something I can definitely throw at them. Trying to be nicer than
that to begin with.

> There is software out there (windows only, unfortunately) that can read
> just about anything on the computer (notepad, IE, Netscape, Word, excel,
> etc) and pipe it out to the sound card as speech. However, the only way
> that it can do this properly for web pages, is if it follows the standards
> laid out by Bobby (http://www.cast.org/bobby/). The cox site fails this
> MISERABLY, (so does Qwest's) which would cause someone who is blind or
> low-vision to not be able to pay their bill online like the rest of us,
> therefore, discriminating against them. To be fair, I ran the plug website
> thru it as well, and it also failed, so maybe we have some work to do on
> our own page so that we can convert some blind people away from the dark
> side. :-)

Yes, we need to fix it. We have a couple of people in the group who have
less than 20/20 vision. I would think that they need us to be compliant.

> In the meantime, does anyone know of good text-to-speech software for
> linux? that runs on console, and within X?

There's emacsspeak, which I've never used. I know people who say they've
gotten pretty good results with festival. I got it to work well once, but
usually have probs with it. It is fun to point it at some code :).

ciao,

der.hans
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