accessibility_literacy_2

toc =Why this page?= When I wrote [|Accessibility and Literacy: Two Sides of the Same Coin] two years ago for ETCjournal.com, I was not aware of some interesting initiatives in this field. Moreover, some of the features I described in this post have evolved since. As I cannot modify this post anymore, I am using this wiki page to update it. =Progresses= This section refers to progresses in the elements described in the blog post:

Treaty for Improved Access for Blind, Visually Impaired and other Reading Disabled Persons
For a comprehensive documentation on this treaty and updates on its progress at WIPO,see http://www.keionline.org/node/1089 and http://keionline.org/r2r.

Speech-to-text
Watching again the automatic captions for the [|Don’t get sucked in by the rip…] video in the [|UNSW] YouTube channel mentioned in the "Short words are the rub" section of the mentioned blog post, though there are still many mistakes, there seem to have been some progresses in the recognition of short words by Google's voice recognition software. Besides, automatic captioning is now also possible with Japanese videos. This progress goes beyond Youtube videos, as this software is also offered in Android-powered cell phones and tablets. Then Apple has now bought the [|Siri] speech-to-text application and integrated it in the operating system of the iPhone 4S while removing it from its App Store, thus effectively preventing people who own a former version of the iPhone from installing it. Not having access t an iPhone 4S, I cannot assess the efficiency of Siri. Cf also [|See Your Siri and Raise You a Yap: Amazon Quietly Snaps Up Speech-Recognition Startup]by Alex Madrigal (Salon, Nov. 9. 2011). Again, not having - and not intending to have - a Kindle Fire, I cannot assess the efficiency of Yap. Endowing portable devices with speech-to-text capability could mean a huge help for deaf people in F2F communication, and for people who cannot write in general.

Text-to-speech
(check which portable devices offer it, and with what limitations 1324726388) =Worsening of copyright obstacles= (to be continued 1324726388)