We tightly integrate spoken output with the user application. Such tight integration allows the functions providing spoken feedback direct access to the application context. Thus, in the case of the calendar example shown in Fig. 1, the speech feedback routines can access the runtime environment of the calendar application to find out that the current date is Sunday, January 1, 1995 instead of trying to guess this from the visual presentation of the calendar.
Thus, using speech as a first-class output medium provides direct access to the information displayed by an application -traditional screen-readers provide what can at best be described as indirect access.