AssistiveWare on Friday announced VisioVoice for Mac OS X. It’s designed to be a multilingual companion to VoiceOver, the Mac OS X v10.4 “Tiger” technology that provides assistance to sight-impaired Mac users. VisioVoice will ship in June. A price was not announced.
VoiceOver is built in to Mac OS X v10.4, and it provides visually impaired users with audio cues to guide them in using the Mac’s graphical user interface. In addition to making sounds associated with the user interface itself, VoiceOver can pronounce letters and words on the screen, punctuation, offers navigational enhancements, manages exception lists for commonly used terms that Apple’s text-to-speech technology might mispronounce, and more.
VisioVoice adds support for VoiceOver to work in non-English languages. VisioVoice will also enhance VoiceOver with natural-sounding voices created by the Acapela Group. AssistiveWare didn’t announce Friday what languages will be supported by VisioVoice, but asked users interested in the technology to complete a survey on their Web site.
AssistiveWare will demonstrate VisioVoice at next week’s CSUN conference in Los Angeles, Calif.