Firefox generally doesn't let you use a lot of OS X's accessibility features, including the services menu and some of OS X's regular keyboard shortcuts. One effect of this is that really easy method for speaking the highlighted text when you press a key doesn't work.

The Firefox extension SpeakingFox fills this gap with some nifty context menu options which pass the currently highlighted text to OS X's default speech engine.

If you don't highlight any text, selecting "Start speaking text" will just speak the word currently under the cursor. As you'd expect, "Stop speaking" halts any speech currently going on.

This extension doesn't make Firefox into a fully accessible web browser for a blind person - for that you'll need to use an accessible browser, or a much more complicated extension such as FireVox. But for most of us who just need long sections spoken, and can highlight them with a mouse, SpeakingFox is just perfect.

- Ricky Buchanan

Proloquo2Go is a Alternative & Augmentative Communication (AAC) program for Apple's iPhone and iPod touch, soon to be available from AssistiveWare and Sennott Consulting.

We know that Proloquo2Go has been built from the ground up for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and will be offering symbol and text-based communication with text-to-speech voices, but until now not many details have been revealed. This has changed now that the new Proloquo2Go website has been launched, including a Proloquo2Go Community Discussion Mailing List.

The introductory price for Proloquo2Go will be made available at an introductory price of US$149, rising to US$199 after several weeks. As we speculated in our previous article about Proloquo2Go, this is just a fraction of the price of similar AAC solutions - even taking into account the cost of an iPod Touch or iPhone. This low price makes it a great choice for self-funded AAC users as well as those who want an easily portable secondary AAC system to go with a larger desktop system.

The website has a lot of information, including these sections:

• About Proloquo2Go details features, basics of usage, and how the vocabulary works.
• Users of Proloquo2Go details Child, Teen, and Adult uses including case studies and quotes from users, teachers, family, and other supporters.
• Proloquo2Go Manual describes basic use, configuration and options, and more complicated features such as verb morphology.
• The Support section includes the FAQ, contact details, a sign up list for people who want to be kept abreast of developments, and the mailing list referred to above.

Proloquo2Go has been submitted to the iTunes App Store, but needs to be approved by Apple before it's available for customers to purchase. This means it may be available within a few weeks, or at worst case Apple may take several months to approve it. The developers have no control over this approval process so they're undoubtedly as frustrated at the rest of us at the delay. We'll let you know as soon as Proloquo2Go is available, but suggest all interested people go to the website and sign up to stay informed about progress.

The developers have also very kindly given me access to a preview copy of Proloquo2Go to test out on my own iPod Touch, so I should be able to report further details very soon. If you have any questions you'd specifically like addressed, just leave a comment below and I'll do the best I can!

Website: Proloquo2Go

- Ricky Buchanan

Voice4Me is one of the free programs available at the SchoolFreeware website. It's a very basic AAC program for users who have trouble speaking - users can click on a picture to speak the associated text, or type text into a box and then click on the 'speak' button.

There's a comprehensive introduction to this program available on the YouTube website, including configuration instructions:

[embed width="640" height="385"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcGindLKhMM[/embed]

The program is very limited in how much it can be configured - you must have both the picture and the text areas, and the number and size of the pictures can't be varied. The program also can't be controlled by keyboard alone if you want to access the pictures, so it's not usable with any combination of switches which is unfortunate. On the plus side it's free and once it's set up it's fairly easy to use. If you have no access to other AAC software this could be helpful.

Website: Voice4Me

- Ricky Buchanan

AssistiveWare and Sennott Consulting have announced that they are working on a groundbreaking Alternative & Augmentative Communication (AAC) program for Apple's iPhone and iPod touch called Proloquo2Go. It's expected to ship by the end of March, 2009.

Features listed on the Proloquo2Go website:

• Communication system designed from the ground up optimized for the iPhone/iPod touch
• Built-in text-to-speech (male, female and child voices)
• Picture and text based communication
• Over 6000 symbols plus you can easily add your own pictures
• Easy to use, yet with powerful customization options
• Many innovative features to facilitate and speed up your communication

No cost has been released yet, but I would expect that even with the cost of an iPod Touch included this should make a very competitively priced AAC system. A Cyrano Communicator, for example, costs US$1399 and runs on a small pocket PC with a touchscreen which is very roughly similar to an iPod Touch or iPhone. Saltillo's ChatPC, running on a touchscreen palm sized PC runnind Windows Mobile, starts from US$2395. Dynavox's Palmtop3 costs US$5245 and also runs on a touchscreen palm sized PC running Windows Mobile.

Those who are interested can leave their details on the website and will be notified when Proloquo2Go is available. Samuel Sennott has also posted on his blog that there will be presentations on Proloquo2Go at the ATIA conference this week. See his post for further details.

Website: Proloquo2Go

- Ricky Buchanan

[proloquo2go-disclaim]

Did you know that you can change narrators automatically when you're using GhostReader? It's an undocumented feature, and only works with the voices from Infovox iVox or ConvenienceWare, but I've confirmed that it does work.

The biggest catch is that you can only switch between voices which are the same voice type and the same voice category. The voice type is either 'Infovox iVox' or 'ConvenienceWare', the ConvenienceWare voices can only be used within GhostReader whereas the iVox voices can be used with any programs. The voice categories are 'HD' and 'HQ' or 'HQM' (these two appear to be the same). To find out which voices are in which category, look on these pages:

• ConvenienceWare Voices lists the category and gender in brackets for each ConvenienceWare voice.
• Infovox iVox Voices does the same for the iVox voices.

We can see from this, for example, that the American English voices "Heather", "Laura", "Ryan", "Kenny", and "Nelly" are all HQ/HQM voices so we can swap between these.

To do the voice change, you put this command in your text:

\vce=speaker=newspeaker\

Instead of the word "newspeaker" you need to use the name of the voice you want, but the rest has to be exact - including the last backslash. So if you're using American English voices, try using this text:

\vce=speaker=heather\Are you coming along? \vce=speaker=ryan\Sure I am, I'd love to! \vce=speaker=laura\I will come along too.

It will start out with Heather, then switch to Ryan and then to Laura. If you have the British English voices, you could use this text instead instead:

\vce=speaker=Lucy\Are you coming along? \vce=speaker=Peter\Sure I am, I'd love to! \vce=speaker=Graham\I will come along too.

I only own the British English InfoVox iVox voices so I haven't tried to see if this works when switching between languages. If it does, it could be a really useful thing for when you have a document that changes from one language to another.

Remember, this is an undocumented command, and the speech synthesis system doesn't really "know" you've changed voices so it won't automatically change back to your default voice for more speech afterwards. For example, my default system voice is Peter, but after using the snippet above (which finishes with Graham speaking) any speech synthesis afterwards will still use the Graham voice. To fix this, add another switching command for your default system voice at the end of your document. So to switch back to my default Peter voice, the above text becomes this:

\vce=speaker=Lucy\Are you coming along? \vce=speaker=Peter\Sure I am, I'd love to! \vce=speaker=Graham\I will come along too.\vce=speaker=Peter\

It doesn't matter that there's no text after the last voice switch, it just tells the speech synth to switch back to Peter. So when my computer next announces the time, or I ask it to speak a block of text, it will be back to speaking in the Peter voice.

Can you think of any fun uses for this? Leave a comment!

- Ricky Buchanan