Screen Readers and Voice Recognition for Chinese

[lansu]

October 15th was International Blind Persons Day, and I was reading about a blind teacher named Xie Jianjian who travels and writes a blog ... The reporter says that Xie Jianjian uses a special software "tool" that allows him to access the web and type his posts from a keyboard, at a rate of about 100 characters/minute:

　谢建建告诉记者说，他平时上网写帖子用的是一种盲人专用上网辅助工具，可以对网上内容进行语音识别。随后，他和记者通过网上聊天工具进行交流，他每分钟能打百八十个字。

Does anyone know what tool/s he might be using?

ps: The article states that in China, each year there are more than 450,000 newly-blind people, and more than 1.35 million newly low-sighted people ...

[bryce1]

With the help of a screen reader, I would imagine that blind people could use any input method--although, it would have to be character/structure-based, since the phonetic ones usually make users choose from a list, which a blind person would not be able to do. Examples of IMEs would be: 五笔，仓颉，etc.

As for screen readers, I unfortunately only know of Jaws and a few others in English. My sister is blind and has used a computer since she was young--although, in some ways, it must be a lot harder for blind people in China, since the written language is not at all phonetic. I do wonder how they can reread what they wrote and know if the characters are correct. (unless there is a way to have the character code read back or to have an example word given with the specific character)