Talk

London, England April 1, 2017
Non-verbal Accessibility

I have selective mutism, so I spend part of my life mute. Until recently, it only affected me some days and was not a problem. Recently it became prolonged and stronger, causing me to not be able to talk at all with people. This causes all kinds of interesting problems at work, ranging from the inability to say 'hi' to co-workers, to how I'll attend a meeting and provide input.

Text To Speech software to the rescue! Turns out, this is a lot harder than you would expect. While my co-workers are accepting, they often forget. It also turns out that conversations have a lot of complicated rules that you wouldn't be aware of. Although that doesn't matter if the software for the meeting doesn't provide accessibility.