Introduction
With IT becoming more and more ubiquitous in virtually all environments from the office to the home, the ability to interact successfully with computers is becoming an almost essential requirement. The person without such an ability is now severely disadvantaged. In the case of most able bodied users, any problems are usually cognitive ones and can often be overcome by a period of training (Colin, 2000). For physically disabled users the problems are not so straightforward to cure.
Features of Alternative Operating System
Speech recognition systems, also called voice recognition programs, allow people to give commands and enter data using their voices rather than a mouse or keyboard. Voice recognition systems use a microphone attached to the computer, which can be used to create text documents such as letters or e-mail messages, browse the Internet, and navigate among applications and menus by voice (David, Richard, 2000). Speech recognition systems are also used by people with language and learning disabilities who have difficulty typing or reading text.
Screen review utilities make on-screen information available as synthesized speech and pairs the speech with a visual representation of a word, for example, highlighting a word as it is spoken. Screen review utilities convert the text that appears on screen into a computer voice. This helps some people with language impairments. Some individuals with learning impairments find speech recognition easier to use for writing text. Additional assistive technology products used with computers by people with language impairments also include others which are defined above:
- Keyboard filters
- Speech recognition programs
- Speech synthesizers
Word prediction programs allow the user to select a desired word from an on-screen list located in the prediction window. This list, generated by the computer, predicts words from the first one or two letters typed by the user (Josef, 1992)...............................
