Anecdotal comment: it looks like Amazon is putting an audio player at the top of each press release to showcase their "Amazon Polly" deep learning voiceover. Starting at 3:18 in the audio it starts reading the entire table and (expectedly) screws up reading the table, but not too bad.
However it's a great way of proving that we are not ready for computers to read to us yet.
Hi Jeff, here's a suggestion: When entering a table, maybe Polly can announce the table and read each data cell followed by the <th> descriptor for that cell.
Example:
"Table 1: Row 1: [Instance name: z1d.large] ... [vCPUs: 2] ... [Memory: 16 GB] ... [Local Storage: 1 x 75 GB NVMe SSD] ... [EBS-Optimized Bandwidth: Up to 2.333 Gbps] ... [Network Bandwidth: Up to 10 Gbps] ... [pause] ... Row 2: [...]"
This is how a human would read it, so Polly should do it that way too. What a human actually ends up doing though, is reference the preceding row for each subsequent row. Something like "z1d.xlarge has double the vCPUs, double the Memory, and double the Local Storage, with EBS-Optimized Bandwidth and Network Bandwidth the same." -- I don't think you are at that point yet with Polly ;)
Even better would be to replicate screen reader behavior—not only does it handle tables well, but it can interface with all semantic elements (buttons, navs, links, images, etc) in a well-defined manner.
Hi. I can get a physical (bare metal in newspeak) 8-HT Xeon with 64G RAM and 1TB RAID1 SSD for ~$100/month, <strike>10GB</strike> 1GB NIC uplink. How much is the equivalent z1d.2xlarge EC2 instance?
There are multiple providers. This is one of them, it is in Europe, but has datacenters in USA. Is not the cheapest or has the best hardware specs but is good enough. A few google searches will give you alternatives if you care.
The Xeons are not the lastest or fastest models in the city but are good enough, the difference with newer models and higher clock speeds will probably be in 1-10% processing power for most workloads, unless you are _very_ CPU bound.
Of course this is _not_ a 1:1 comparasion with EC2. This are unmanaged bare metal servers (with good http APIs and webpanels to admin though) but sometimes that is good enough and you can save a good chunk of money. You can up/down a server instantly (well - minutes) and you wont be charged if you are not using it.
Text is pretty accessible to visual or reading-impaired users. Screen reader tech is pretty good at handling articles like this. Anybody who needs it probably has a better solution than Polly.
I think the majority of the perceived screwed-upness comes from its failure to enunciate "vCPU" and "NVMe", so I think it'll sound a lot better once they fix this bug.
However it's a great way of proving that we are not ready for computers to read to us yet.