RIM Launches BlackBerry Screen Reader for the Visually Impaired

The Canadian company behind BlackBerry has launched what it calls the BlackBerry Screen Reader application. From the explanation provided at the launching, its main purpose is to assist visually impaired individuals. The free application allows BlackBerry customers an audible output based on the information that is displayed on the screen at that particular time. The application has already been released for the BlackBerry Curve 9350, 9360 and the 9370.

Some of the key features about this application that were highlighted are the support for core applications which is where users can easily access the more important BlackBerry applications including email, calendar, phone calls and others, Speech settings which is where users can customize the text-to-speech settings (volume, pitch and speech rate) and preferences for punctuation, verbosity and password security.

Thirdly are the keyboard shortcuts which allows users to set speech and audio preferences quickly and easily through physical keyboard shortcuts and finally, accessible documentation which allows users to access a guide for the application which is in HTML through a desktop web browser. Although the support for visually impaired individuals is something that many manufacturers recently have been focusing on, this comes just in time with BlackBerry’s announcement of its latest platform BlackBerry 10.