This is very true. I studied abroad last year, and some of the students who could not read had an incredibly difficult time. Eventually, they were forced to catch up, and life got much better for them. They could explore the city much easier, do things on there own, without having to have someone who could read with them.
I thought we were talking about people who spoke Chinese? Can't they just ask?
On a few occasions, in my own country, I've had old immigrants ask me to read something for them. I don't know if they are visually impaired or illiterate but it wasn't a big deal. (Though it is sad when you consider these people have probably been living here for a long time.)
Anyway, if it's someone who doesn't speak English it's not _that_ difficult to find medicine.
Go on the Internet, google a picture of the medicine you need, and show it to people?
Or use Google Translate? I've communicated with realtors using Google Translate. It was a frustrating experience, but it worked.
And if that doesn't work then I'm sure you can find _someone_ who speaks English. That wouldn't take half an hour, I'm sure. You can also try using gestures or drawings.
This strikes me as fairly trivial stuff. I mean, I'll grant you that I'd be worried sick if my mother was running around in Taipei on her own, as she's not used to traveling and doesn't speak English. But we seem to be talking about young, smart, educated English speakers here. It's not that big a deal.
I spent last year studying in Beijing, and I reached a certain level of fluency, but now that I have come back, I have trouble maintaining it. I read books (许三观卖血记，活着, both by Yu Hua), and go through my Anki flashcards, and sometimes read through my textbooks.
My reading abilities haven't fallen much, but it's my ability to create sentences, i.e., talking, that's failing me. Mainly because I'm not talking with anybody, can't find anybody to talk with.
The nice thing about learning Chinese is that no matter where you are in the world, you can find Chinese language exchange partners. If you live near a university, post an advertisement in the engineering or sciences buildings (or wherever you expect to find Chinese students) or post an ad at a bus stop in the neighborhood where the Chinese students usually live (in my hometown, most Chinese students live in the same neighborhood). Another place is the best local Chinese restaurant. I have a couple language exchange partners I found by posting an ad at the bus stop. Each week, we spend 1 hour speaking Chinese and 1 hour working on reading/writing academic articles in English.
Does anyone know if this does full speech-to-text transcription, i.e., I speak, it fills my speech into a text box? Or is it just for controlling the desktop via speech I tried googling, but couldn't come up with much.
on a side note: this is part of the HTML5 specification. If people are not afraid of Google/Chrome and if being online is not an issue, it's as simple as this: http://jsfiddle.net/dirkk0/pGFuR/
I only found https://wiki.mozilla.org/SpeechAPI for the FF implemenation, looks like it has no Linux support either, but I only glanced at the patch they made... It seems to support recording for OSX and Windows at least.
