Well, folks, it's official: we've now been doing this show for so gosh-darned long that we can no longer keep track of what made it into the plot and what didn't. We could have sworn that we did a scene on Apple looking to hire programmers to work on a Mac OS X screen reader, but we're digging around through the Reruns and not finding anything, so apparently that was just one of those scenes we only wrote in our heads. Clearly the medication isn't helping.

Which means we have to do the setup, here. For the uninitiated, a screen reader is software that turns onscreen computer data into spoken text or some other form of nonvisual information that can be understood by the visually impaired. The Mac's Text-To-Speech technology alone doesn't cut it, since it can't read menu items, let you navigate tabs in Safari, tell you which icons do what in Mail, etc. Imagine what you'd need to operate your Mac successfully with your eyes closed (no, "holes in your eyelids" don't count), and you'll get the general idea.

There was a bit of a hubbub last year when ALVA, the makers of the only screen reader software for the Mac, announced that it was discontinuing its product-- effectively removing the Mac platform completely from the list of computing options for the blind. Now let's say, just for the moment, that you're going to be completely mercenary and un-PC by saying "no big loss; how many blind computer users can there be?" Well, here's the thing, see... the lack of screen reader software doesn't just cost Apple sales to blind individuals. It could well have cost Apple big-ticket sales in the education and government markets, because if Macs aren't viable computers for use by the visually impaired, that could get customers in trouble for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. So trust us-- this is a big deal. (And by the way, you're an insensitive clod. Ha! Just kidding.)

So with a couple of screen readers available for Windows and none for the Mac, and possibly thousands upon thousands of sales at stake, Apple decided to pull a Safari: it'd just write its own. As faithful viewer Mike Scherer informs us, today the company finally introduced the first public peek at what it's got so far: a coming-soon technology it's calling Spoken Interface, which "reads aloud the contents of documents like Web pages, Mail messages, and word processing files; provides a comprehensive audible description of your workspace and all the activities taking place on your computer; and includes a rich set of keyboard commands that allow you to navigate the Mac OS X interface and interact with application and system controls." And are you ready for the cool part? It's going to be a native part of Mac OS X 10.4.

The fact that Spoken Interface will just be yet another addition to Mac OS X's Universal Access technologies is a huge plus; screen readers for Windows apparently cost on the order of a cool thou, which pretty much makes the Mac lots cheaper than any comparable Wintel once the cost of a screen reader gets thrown in. Also, since it's going to be built right into Mac OS X's foundation, developers barely need to lift a finger to make their Cocoa apps work with Spoken Interface. BusinessWeek reports that MacJournal (by the way, we love that app) already "worked pretty well" with Spoken Interface "right off the bat" with no code tweaks at all.

Pretty cool stuff-- and isn't it neat how Apple turned an obscure but real crisis into a valid marketing opportunity? In fact, the only real down side to Spoken Interface so far is that it isn't available right now, but given the frenetic pace at which Apple has been cranking out major cat-themed operating system upgrades over the past few years, we have to think that Spoken Interface (and the rest of 10.4, whatever it turns out to be) can't be more than a year off. With luck maybe Apple can keep any potential customers with ADA concerns simply by promising free 10.4 upgrades, or something like that. And here's hoping that the software is as good as most of Apple's efforts, because with the insane amount of TV we watch irradiating our optic nerves, we're going to need to use it ourselves within a decade or so.