I received what should have been a simple request yesterday. The person was interested in an easy way to have a student’s email read out loud to them on their mobile device. In this case the student owns an Android-based smart phone. The phone supports text-to-speech however there are currently no email programs which offer this feature within the app. I didn’t know much about the student so I decided to offer a couple of suggestions. I decided on one response in the event that the student is blind and another if they turned out to have a learning disability.
The solution for a student who couldn't see was pretty straight forward. There is an email app called K-9 mail for Android which works well with the built-in screen reader present on all Android phones (version 1.6 and higher). I recommended K-9 mail because the email program that ships with Android doesn’t work with its own screen reader (get with it Google). Fortunately K-9 mail is a fantastic app and works well with text-to-speech.
Next I turned my attention on a method for a child who has trouble reading. Things turned out to be much more complicated. After a bit bunch of searching I came up with nothing designed to be used by someone with a learning disability. Nothing. While the Android screen reader method might work for some students, it provides too much speech for most people. So, I decided to hack something together using exiting Android apps. After a couple hours I had a solution figured out that didn’t involve cutting and pasting from one app into another. My solution was easy to use but complicated to set up. Things just shouldn’t be this way.
The same situation is true for iPhones and iPads by the way. Apple’s built-in mobile screen reader, “VoiceOver” is a phenomenal tool for someone who is blind but it can be unwieldy for those just wanting to have some text read back to them. I’ll steer clear of an Android versus iPhone discussion at this point but suffice to say both platforms have left a huge section of the population out of their accessibility plans. How about it Apple – Google care to do something about this?
