News - May 8, 2008
New version of the CLC-4-TTS Bundle: Several enhancements and bug fixes in this release. Most notably, for Mac users who have upgraded to Leopard, there is a huge improvement in the stability of the speech engine as a result of switching to the newer Leopard TTS engine.
Fire Vox has support for site specific enhancements provided by the AxsJAX project. AxsJAX leverages AJAX techniques to inject accessibility support into Web 2.0 applications. It is a project that I am working on and the idea is that it can be used to transform a regular web application into a self-voicing application. These enhancements can simplify the way you use these pages. For example, on Google Web Search, instead of finding the first result of a page, then navigating to the result snippet, and then navigating back to the result link if the snippet proves interesting, you can simply hit the 'n' key to hear the next result on the page and press Enter to follow it.
AxsJAX also paves the way for creating accessibility mashups. AxsJAX for the xkcd webcomic is an example of such a mashup; the transcripts are dynamically fetched from the ohnorobot comic search engine and inserted as alt text on the xkcd comic pages. A listing of the web sites that have been AxsJAXed, along with user guides, can be found on the AxsJAX showcase page.
By default, AxsJAX enhancements are turned on. You can enable/disable using AxsJAX from the Fire Vox Options menu by checking/unchecking "Use site specific enhancements". I'm really excited about the possibilities offered by AxsJAX and would love to hear any suggestions you have for making it even better.
For anyone who will be in the San Francisco Bay Area at the end of May, please come and see me live and in person at the Google I/O conference. There are lots of great talks scheduled for this event; and T.V. Raman and I will be giving a about AxsJAX in our "Leveraging Web-2.0 Design Patterns For Enhanced Accessibility" session. Hope to see you there!