1 Introduction to Braille and Refreshable Braille Displays

• Pamela Lorimer, A Critical Evaluation of the Historical Development of the Tactile Modes of Reading and an Analysis and Evaluation of Researches Carried Out in Endeavours to Make the Braille Code Easier to Read and to Write
• Deane Blazie, Refreshable Braille Now and in the Years Ahead

2 Introduction to Speech Synthesis and Free Speech Synthesis Software

• Dennis H. Klatt (1987), Review of Text-to-Speech Conversion for English
• Smithsonian History of Speech Synthesis Project
• The Festival Speech Synthesis Project
• Flite: Festival Lite
• EFlite: Emacspeak Speech Server for Festival Lite
• eSpeak Speech Synthesizer

3 Console-Level Screen Readers for Speech Access

• The Speakup Project (a kernel-level screen reader)
• The Yasr Project (‘Yet Another Screen Reader’ or ‘Your All-Purpose Screen Reader’)
• Speech Dispatcher (a client/server framework for allowing multiple technologies—Speakup, Orca (see below) and others to access a single speech synthesizer, typically a software synthesizer.)

4 Braille Access

• The BRLTTY Project

5 Speech-Enabled Applications

• The Emacspeak Project (a speech-enabling extension for Emacs)
• T.V. Raman, Auditory User Interfaces: Towards the Speaking Computer
• For more of T.V. Raman’s publications, see his home page.
• Fire Vox (a speech-enabling extension for Mozilla Firefox)
• T.V. Raman, Announcing the Coming of Piglets to the Emacspeak Desktop (an interface between Emacspeak and Firevox)

6 Speech and Braille Access under the X Window System

• Historical background: The UltraSonix (Mercator) Project. This is of historical interest only; it was released under a non-free licence and development was discontinued ca. 1996.
• The Gnome Accessibility Project
• Gunnar Schmidt, The Gnome Accessibility Architecture (ATK and AT-SPI)
• Orca (a screen reader for Gnome)
• The KDE Accessibility Project
• The Mozilla Accessibility Project
• OpenOffice.org Accessibility
• Linux Foundation: OpenA11y standards (accessibility standards across operating systems and desktop environments.)

7 Challenges for the Future

• Jason White, From Documents to User Interfaces: Universal Design and the Emergence of Abstraction (also available here in the original, superior, LATEX typesetting as a PDF document, and as a more universally accessible HTML document.