Screen Readers

This article was written by Joe

Computer Science

Joe is a Computer Science student at Durham Unviersity who has been studying Computer Science since his time at secondary school. He is also a fan of video games, such as Kirby.

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Screen readers are a type of program that were produced for computers in order to help those who are blind or otherwise visually impaired to read text on computers. Screen readers give them the means to know what is written on the page without directly reading using concepts such as text to speech.

Screen readers have been available publicly from at least 2000 as the Microsoft narrator was included in the Windows2000 OS. The Microsoft narrator reads the text on screen using a text to speech bot, this concept has been used to make many other text to speech screen readers such as the android Talkback screen reader and Voice over which is used on Apple devices.

an image of the logo for windows narrator - source: assistivlabs

There are also other kinds of screen reader such as a refreshable braille display which dynamically changes the braille depending on the text on screen. The screen readers interprets the text and then converts it into the corresponding braille characters which are outputed on the display usually by raising pins to emulate the bumps that represent the characters.

an image of a refreshable braille display - source: wikimedia commons. The image is by Sebastien Delorme and is liscenced under the creative commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 unported licence

Screen Readers are great for making technology more accesible and also more helpful to society. If you are interested in other ways that technology can help society then check out the other tabs at the top.

sources for information: Wikipedia: Screen readers , Wikipedia:Refreshable Braille display