A self-voicing application is an application that provides an aural interface without requiring a separate

screen reader A screen reader is a form of assistive technology (AT) that renders text and image content as speech or braille output. Screen readers are essential to blindness, blind people, and are useful to visually impaired people, Illiteracy, illiterate, ...

. Self-voicing applications can be an important form of

assistive technology Assistive technology (AT) is a term for assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative devices for Disability, people with disabilities and the elderly. Disabled people often have difficulty performing activities of daily living (ADLs) independently, ...

, useful to those who have difficulty reading or seeing. A prominent group of self-voicing applications are talking web browsers. Traditionally, talking web browsers have been specially created, as was the case with: * pwWebSpeak, originally developed by The Productivity Works in Princeton, New Jersey (now obsolete) * Simply Web (also now obsolete) * Home Page Reader (HPR) from IBM (recently discontinued) * Connect Outloud from Freedom Scientific * WebAnywhere from University of Washington A more recent trend has seen the self-voicing capabilities added to mainstream web browsers with free add-ons. In 2004, Opera Software created a self-voicing and speech-recognition extension for the Windows version of their web browser. And in 2005 Charles L. Chen devised Fire Vox, an extension that adds speech capabilities to the Mozilla Firefox web browser on Mac, Windows, or Linux. A second important category are broader self-voicing applications that function as what T. V. Raman calls "complete audio desktops",T. V. Raman
Emacspeak - The Complete Audio Desktop
Accessed 2007-02-03. including editing, browsing, and even gaming capabilities. These include Raman's own Emacspeak enhancement for

Emacs Emacs (), originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor Macros"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

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{{Speech synthesis Assistive technology Speech synthesis Augmentative and alternative communication