Hello, all -
Our talking dictionaries at the San Francisco Public Library are
stand-alone devices from Franklin Electronic Publishers, Inc.; I don't know
of any CD-ROM products that would work well with a screenreader. Any
suggestions? Please send them to Mary Taffett. (She gave me permission to
post her question here.) Thanks! Marti

Marti Goddard
Access Services Manager
San Francisco Public Library
100 Larkin Street
San Francisco, CA 94102
415.557.4557 (v)   415.557.4433 (tty)
415.557.4531 fax


>Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 18:33:32 -0400
>From: "Mary D. Taffet" <[log in to unmask]>
>Organization: Syracuse University
>To: Marti Goddard <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: What Talking Dictionaries are available forSpanish-English to
assist
> a  blind student?
>
>Hello,
>
>I am writing you because your webpage came up in a web search I just
>did.
>
>My sister tutors a man who is blind, primarily in math.  While the
>issues she faces in her efforts to communicate mathematical concepts to
>a blind student are interesting all by themselves, right now she is also
>trying to help him with his Spanish class.
>
>My sister neither reads nor speaks Spanish, though she does attempt to
>pronounce it to him as best she can.
>
>The issue this student faces right now is in finding a Spanish term in
>his paper-based dictionary.  What he currently does is scan in pages
>from the paper dictionary to his computer, a page at a time; his
>computer will read the words on that page and he keeps looking,
>sometimes for hours at a time, until he finds the right page for the
>word he is searching for.
>
>Given that machine-readable dictionaries exist, there has to be a better
>way.  So today my sister asked me if I knew of any Spanish dictionaries
>available on CD-Rom.  As I did not know of any myself right off hand, I
>did a web search, and up came a link to your page on Talking
>Dictionaries in your Assistive Technology section for the Library for
>the Blind and Print Disabled.  Thus my question -- what Talking
>Dictionaries might you use for Spanish-English in order to assist your
>blind patrons?
>
>In addition to your webpage, a number of products came up in my search.
>One of the better-sounding products is WordAce -- do you know anything
>about it; if so, how good is it and how useful might it be to a blind
>student (and a tutor who neither speaks nor reads Spanish)?
>
>I look forward to hearing back from you.
>
>-- Mary Taffet
>   Syracuse University
>   School of Information Studies
>   Syracuse, NY
>   [log in to unmask]