Electronics in medicine: How computers talk to the blind: Sightless computer programmers provide input by keyboard and are responded to by a synthetic speech unit

Microcomputers, which make synthetic speech feasible, promise to open job opportunities for the blind in fields heretofore closed to them. At the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington, D.C., a blind computer programmer has been using a prototype microcomputer-controlled voice generator for more than a year. It allows the host computer to communicate by synthesized voice with the programmer. The programmer interacts with the computer by keyboard in the conventional manner.