Instant messaging with screen readers?

Other Chit-Chat
1

So I’ve got a friend of mine (and, as it turns out, an alumna of an FRC team) who is blind. Another friend of mine and I are trying to get her on AIM (or, at the bare minimum, some form of instant messaging), but we’re batting zero thus far…and I’ve got a gut feeling that someone, somewhere on ChiefDelphi has experience with this issue. She’s got JAWS 6.1, release date apparently sometime in late 2005, and is running Windows XP Professional. AIM supports JAWS 8, but I can’t find any upgrade information for it on Freedom Scientific’s site…and judging by their full retail price ($1,100), I’d much rather find a solution that works with what’s already there.

Thus far, we know the following programs don’t read incoming messages with JAWS 6.1:

AIM 6.1
Gaim
Trillian Basic
AIM Express using MS Internet Explorer
Yahoo! Messenger

Also, I poked around in iChat AV for Mac OS X (10.4.9) with VoiceOver turned on, but to no avail. (However, the Leopard Accessibility preview on their site makes me even more interested in the new version. Hey Steve, sometime while I can still apply the student discount?)

The most we can get thus far is moving the cursor (which in and of itself is a problem) to the box of messages, selecting a bit, and having JAWS (or VoiceOver) read the entire conversation. Or, using Adium X v.1.0.2 for Mac OS X combined with spoken Growl notifications, messages can be read back…but it doesn’t specify who sent the message and talks over itself if multiple messages come in at the same time. For IM conversations of any appreciable length, these are not workable solutions.

Does anybody have any insight into rigging this up to work?

2

zoom text 9.0, im visually impaired, but i can see just fine on the computer, no accessibility needed, all i use is a manual magnifying glass if my eyes get tired.

but if you want, try that out, or contact the Division of Blind Services in your local metropolitan area, get her involved in the community, and the government pays for the JAWS and whatever else she needs.

if she goes to a school for the deaf and blind, then she already has access to these resources, all she needs to do is get in contact with them and address her situation.

3

Ventrilo. You can open up it’s chat option and enable “text to speech”.

Sorry, all I can think of.