jump to article AFB  ® Technology News for People Who Are Blind
or Visually Impaired From the American Foundation for the Blind
May 2004 Issue  Volume 5  Number 3  Product Evaluation  We Think
They Hear Us Now: Cell Phones with Speech   Following up on our
article, "Do Cell Phones Plus Software Equal Access? Part 2" in
the January 2004 issue of AccessWorld, in which we discussed two
Nokia cell phones, combined with third-party text-to-speech
software, this article evaluates two cell phones that come
equipped with a degree of speech output right out of the box.
One of these phones is produced by both Audiovox and Toshiba and
is known as both the Audiovox CDM 9950 and the Toshiba VM 4050.
We refer to it as the Audiovox/Toshiba. The other phone we
evaluated is the Samsung SPH-a660. These two phones were not
designed to offer the overall degree of accessibility that is
found in the two Nokia phones with added software, but the
speech output that is included may represent the beginning of a
trend in which manufac