Slashdot Mirror
Mouse Lets Blind "see" Graphics
mblase writes "CNN.com reports on an Israeli company that has developed a "mouse" for the blind that enables them to "see" web graphics. The VirTouch Mouse (VTM) has three fingertip-sized arrays of 32 pins each that rise and fall depending on how white, black, or grey a particular part of the screen is. According to reactions posted on the company Web site, 25 out of 26 users reported "good" or "very good" success with the device. This could be the first step in making the Web truly accessible to the blind; now if only we could eliminate all-Flash sites as well."
I have something important to say, and that is: Daddy would you like some sausage? Daddy would you like some sausage?
Get my point son? You usually have something to say but today, nope. You should have stuck with the anonymous Timothy bashing, it's much funnier.
Yes, yes you are. You are a very weak troll. I've been watching you lately. You have been failing miserably to impress anyone.
I didn't know who you 'really' were. My bad momo, didn't mean to piss in your punch.
The phreak who told John Draper
(i.e. Captain Crunch) that one
can whistle the 2600 tone was
blind. No, really.
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From the Slashdot FAQ: A lot of times, we don't use a particular story on a particular day, but at some later point, someone else submits it, and it ends up getting used. We have 4 to 6 guys working together to post things on Slashdot. What one of us finds stupid, the others might find interesting. Or it just might be the rest of the stuff that's going on that day. There are a variety of factors: the personality of the post, the quality of the submission, or even the quantity of stories already posted when your submission entered the queue.
Me, I'm rather glad that the submission reviewers aren't one big hive-mind.
Well god damn it, it traumatized me! I think the blind ought to be traumatized too!
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Braille terminals have been around for quite some time, as have screen "readers" that use speech synthesis. The easiest (and best) way to make pages accessible to the blind is to make them easily navigable with lynx.
No. Really.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
I can't even think of how well the porn industry is going to exploit this new technology. I'm not blind, but I certainly plan on being able to feel that nipple with the new mouse. Woo hoo!
I agree with what you say, but I have one counter-example: speed. I know people who can read braille much faster than I can read text (and I'm a pretty fast reader). It makes it that much more efficient for the blind. I could also rant about text-to-speech synthesis and processor utilization, but that's irrelevant.
Also, with text-to-braille one can control the speed at which they read, if they skip text, etc. Fast braille is very different than listening to a chipmunk.
In other words, I think both approaches have their uses.
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"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
I'm wonderring about this in a slightly different fashion. "Feeling" graphics aside, I wonder how this could be used to help the blind read web pages. Couldn't this technology be used just as easily to scan the ascii character at the cursor and render it in brail, litterally at the person's fingertips?
I can see many uses for this technology. If nothing else, it would make things like USENET directly accessable to the blind.
Now, of course, I have a vested interest in this, because my grandfather was both blind and brilliant, and would have substantially benefitted from technology like this.
Of couse, there are a bunch of technical problems with turning a web page into brail, like, how does one find the start of the text? How can one be expected to drag the mouse in a straight line over the text so as to not scramble the contents of what they're reading? But I think these questions can be solved. I truly think this holds vast potential, so congrats to the company behind this!
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"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
This is a lot like Braille, and yet very few Braille printers are being made these days. And Braille use is on the decline. Everyone who is blind knows that voice synthesizers are on the rise. With e-books becoming more popular, no one will be able to afford the battery power to drive solenoids for braille, or worse these image drawing pins. e-books feed the voice synthesizer module for the blind and they can have equal access to texts. Everyone fill out your ALT tags properly please!
Wow, My pal, Adam Bailey, built one of these in 1992. He was inspired by his blind lab partner in a class at the University of Buffalo. He made it, with alot of advice from others, and it had a matrix of vibrating pins, like contemporary optical readers, and ran a TSR program which downloaded the bitmap of the area around the mouse pointer to the mouse. It worked with DOS and Windows 3.1.
He submitted it as a project for a class. Other people submitted lots of stupid stuff that didn't work, and he submitted a working image-feel mouse with software! What do you suppose the Prof did? He got really upset because Adam had not designed packaging for it, when that was not part of the assignment!!!! (I suspect the prof had other plans...)
He now makes Tube amps in Austin, TX. I emailed him to give him shit about this. I'm sure he's long since abandoned any idea of developing this sort of thing, but it should go as a lesson to all of you inventor types, just because there are millions of people in the world and you're broke does not mean that your idea is not worthwhile. Jobs and Woz had to wake up the pope to wake themselves up.... This one ought to work for Adam... It sure works for me!!!
=Rich
_____________________________________
Richard Mortimer Humphrey
Technology consultant to fine artists
rich@cellspace.org
I wonder if you force your browser to display all characters in braille(sp?) if this device would have sufficient resolution to allow one to read a web page?
It still might be cumbersome for reading a long file, but for navigating pages with sidebars, such as slashdot, it could work fairly well.
Other adaptations to browsers could include special color enhancement for the borders of buttons and menus that caused them to be easily identifiable by feel.
I'm evisioning a pre-installed blind-mode for web browsers that one could activate with standards across platforms.
Such modifications could also be applied to desktop themes for windows Mac or Unix systems.
For example, have the affected person wear a video camera on their head [helmet cam?]. The blind person could carry a higher resolution "pad" with maybe 640x480 pins representing the image from the camera. People could use their hands to "see" whatever the camera is pointing at. I might suggest a hands free device, such as one which can be strapped to a person's back, but I don't think there are proper nerves there to sense a high-resolution image.
In fact exactly this was tried in a lab, and worked like a charm. There are adequate nerves in the back - you just have to move the pins farther apart. (Although the resolution may be low enough that you can only do a very narrow image... The test setup only used a small number of vibrating pins. This was quite some time ago, when the equipment was big, custom, and expensive.)
An experimental accident gave an interesting insight into the rewiring abilities of the brain. The camera was on a tripod, and during one of the experiments it tipped over and fell into what it was viewing. The experimental subject, blind from birth, reflexively put his hands in front of his eyes.
That's a very strong indication that the signals from the back had been re-routed into the pathways normally used to process images, implying all that specialized neruoprocessing will be available for even the blind-from-birth to use on images converted to touch. Imagine blind baseball players, or blind drivers as safe as the run-of-the-mill driver.
Afterward the subject commented that for the first time in his life he had a referrent for the word "looming".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
if only we could eliminate all-Flash sites as well.
From most of the flash sites I encounter, being blind would give you an aesthetic advantage.
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
Nothing new, but it's always sad when some poor guy's website gets a casual mention on Slashdot's front page. Not 5 minutes and the site was hosed.
Read the cached version here.
Mozilla
On the other hand, (no pun intended) it's yet another friggin' standard we have to code web pages for. We already have Netscape vs. Microsoft, Computer vs. PDA/Portable, and options like XML and Javascript. Now we have something else? Arrgh!
This will make life easier for web developers (or at least for web developers who won't want to bother writing good, structural HTML). To make a site work well with screen-reading software, you have to do things like adding ALT tags for images, labeling column headers in tables, and avoiding using color as the only thing distinguishing two items on the page. This new software works directly from the screen representation of your page, so as long as your page is usable on a non-color monitor, it should work for people using this new mouse in lightness-darkness mode.
I wouldn't throw out the ALT tags and the structural syntax quite yet, though. Many of the same things you might have done to make your site readable through text-to-speech software also makes the site more readable through PDA browsers, text browsers (lynx/links), text-to-braille software, and graphical browsers where the user has disabled stylesheets. For example, PDA browsers may support scrolling the body of a table while leaving the headers visible in order to make it easier to read a table on a small screen. If you neglect to tell the browser that the first row of cells are actually headers, that feature might not work. ALT tags for images are good for giving search engines a chance to figure out image-heavy pages.
The shareholder is always right.
Seriously, I kid you not, just last Wednesday in a computer class we were talking about possible computer interfaces for blind people and I mentioned the idea of using a big array of pins. I got the idea, of course, from those little toys with all the pins where you push the pins with your hand, then lay it on its side so that the impression of your hand is left in the pins.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Note my submission of this article was rejected 5 hours prior...
2001-04-16 11:08:30 Computer graphics and the blind (articles,hardware) (rejected)
Note that BOBBY is "a free service provided by CAST to help Web page authors identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."
Pretty handy, and sponsored by many of the big Internet companies. Hey mods, can I have some Karma back please???
Support a few technologists in Washington.
I agree that sometimes, flash sucks. But it doesn't have to. Flash integration on a site, like anything on the web, can look good if done right. Too bad the dack.com site is already slashdotted, or I'd stop by to see if it's a joke, an ugly page, or something in between. Any mirrors?
The Good Reverend
I'm different, just like everybody else.
While this is good for the blind, it still isn't enough. Until every image is sufficiently tagged (Requiring an average of a few seconds work per image.) the blind will still have a rough time surfing the web. It is a shame that so many companies cut the blind out like this.
As I read this I was imagining a blind person checking out most of the flashy, trashy, ad oriented website graphics out there.
I suspect after a short time they'd long for the days when all they could get was the text.
But then I'm not blind, so maybe I just don't know.
Jon Sullivan
Jon Sullivan
www.jonsullivan.com
Check out the page with the test graphics on it:
http://virtouch.com/tests.htm
The last one is obviously a naked chick and something from alt.sex.furries (if you don't know, you probobly don't want to).
You'd need a bigger mouse, something that would accomodate your whole hand and perhaps part of your forearm, in this case.
Well, if we want to eliminate all flash sites, we'll just link to em on slashdot, and have nature take it's course. From where I stand, Dack.com is not available.
Because we all now that was unintentional, right Hemos?
Well, since it works on color depths, then mayhaps it wouldn't need alt tags, per se, but what about a blue and a red that are equally bright? To us, who can see, they are dramatically different, but to the blind using this, they are the same. Now, if they are different links, or a picture of red on blue, the difference cannot be seen (felt), and that could ruin the appeal of this design. Any way, this is a step in the right direction, as it is A) better than nothing, and B) happily used by nearly all those in the group who tried it.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
I have the Logitech iFeel MouseMan and this product allows you to "feel" a web page as well. While the iFeel technology is limited to a variable speed "rumble" type force feedback, I have found it to be immensely useful to find links and buttons on pages. For instance, while I am reading the summary of a Slashdot article, I can position the cursor on the link to the comments by "feeling" the link (links and buttons have certain feels to them) and then clicking it as I finish the summary. Not that this would help the blind mich, but I, for one, like the certain feel that my desktop and applications have taken on.
The key is overcoming the "gimmick factor." If they can make it genuinely enhance your interface, it will be successful. Thinkgeek has some info on the iFeel Mouseman's sister, just the cheaper version.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
http://www.dack.com/web/flashVhtml/
Clai
Neither worked for me due to a javascript URL. On principle, I will not make an effort to make javascript urls work - they are the most redundant idea ever invented (must patent it actually)
Does anyone, anywhere, have any use for javascript other than form validation?
PS: I can see how in theory, stuff like javascript and Flash should be better but I haven't seen any example.
Also, is the web the right place for "interactivity". I'll take X11 (and alternatives) any day.
However, I'm partial to the odd Java applet (on some maths/science sites for example where it has demonstrable uses)
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Very interesting. Where'd you get that information? I'd love to read more...
The standards are already here to do it.
All it require is people like you to get off your ass and learn/use them. And places like slashdot to support these kinda things... Instead of shunning them.
Yes, maybe the browser re-direction was a little harsh. But if anyone accutaly bother to read the artical. They would have knowen that there where other ways the were suggested that were way more suttle.
So, really, there are no new standards for all these things. The standards are already there, and have been there for quite sometime. So don't try and shift the blame. It's there, you just too lazy to do anything about it. And so do the slack browser companies, although, the do seem to be getting the message.
"It would be better if websites could be more focused, so that bandwith use by individual pages could be more limited, or at least so that coding could be more focused. "
CSS2, XML/XHTML, look for them on www.w3c.org
10. Maybe now people will get rid of that background graphic on their website...
9. Maybe they won't...
8. Theming Theming Theming
7. Good way to get back at your BOFH population... Make the control panel feel funny to touch.
6. Good way to figure out who the pervs in the office are... Make the control panel feel funny to touch. (And get someone else to fix their computer from now on, ICK!)
5. All Your Base Are Belong To Us.
4. Can you imagine a beowulf cluster hooked up to one of these?
3. Netsex almost enjoyable, news at 11.
2. Porn... Zit covered highschoolers never had it so good.
1. Natalie Portman. Nuff Said.
Eh...
The web was accessible by the blind, it's becoming less so. Think about it. Take a nice simple site, something that Lynx can easily make sense of. All you need to understand it blind is a bit of text-to-speech software. This exists. But now we get hideous sites using tables, frames, and non-critical graphics, and the result becomes a mess. Being able to feel a tiny portion of the screen is helpful, but far from ideal. I'd much rather have sites that seperate the content from the formatting, making it possible to have text-to-speech give blind people the information that matters. Graphics are nice, but most information is text. (Incidentally, for those who don't realise it, CSS can be used to give sites that look nice but are still readable.)
Like most people here, I hate the really heavy sites, those that use endless graphics, multiple columns, those f***ing annoying Flash animation ads, etc, aian.
:)
Consider that no small number of 'web designers' use The Evil Empire as their base of operations, and probably use Back Door, err.. Front Page as their page creation engine. (Personally, I prefer emacs or vim. Oh, yeah.)
Most of the graphics don't have alt tags because these people making eye-candy sites expect the persons at the receiving end to be able to see the damned thing.
I agree that the basic technological premise is good, however, how do they determine 'color depth'? What makes #00558F more or less than #55008F? Do they CMYK or HSV the images? (If so, I know a certain GPL software project that could use such code.
Windows.. Good for targeting rocks.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
now this will sure add a new dimension to browsing porn sites...
give me all your garmonbozia
People who can see, shouldn't design this crap . . .
Can you spot the invention that the 20/20 retard made.
Now even the blind can be subjected to your god-awful color schemes in the Apache and BSD sections.
As usual im writing this from my sofa using an old laptop as a dumb terminal connected to the computer in another room. Textmode really rocks! Now, if there only were VT102 terminals with Braille output...
Well okay http://www.playboy.com doesnt rock in textmode... In that case this device is interresting.
I would love to see someone play a game of Quake with this mouse. Get fragged and have the pins spike through your fingers.
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There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who
... just thought I'd add my 2 cents.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
On the other hand, (no pun intended) it's yet another friggin' standard we have to code web pages for. We already have Netscape vs. Microsoft, Computer vs. PDA/Portable, and options like XML and Javascript. Now we have something else? Arrgh!
It would be better if websites could be more focused, so that bandwith use by individual pages could be more limited, or at least so that coding could be more focused.
Still, who wouldn't want to feel your opponent in UT get fragged? That could be pretty cool!
no my mouse turns text under the cursor info brail and produces a reliefe of any gfx's / window borders depending on the configuration. so it's not quite the same.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Well, without reading the specifics of the technology (I know, I hate it when people make uninformed posts, too, but... everyone is entitled to at least one ;), I get the impression that this would be used on sites who are really concerned about accessibility. What it won't do is automagically make a site accessible to the blind. It'll just make accessible sites even more so. In this way, this is just a complementary tool to ALT tags. So, it doesn't solve any problems, in terms of making already unaccessible sites accessible. But it provides yet another tool for those site authors who are concerned about such things.
As a person who can see, I'm curious about this de vice. To my mind it looks completely inadequate... three little finger pad sized deals. I guess it's supposed to be an input-output device, but how about a similar device that is output only? That would be cool, imho-- especially if it were larger, like the size of a paperback book even.
Also, gotta love a technical company company that can't add. In the survey they have 15 "very goods" to 9 "goods" to get 24, but they say they got 25 good results.
I do not have a signature
Finger? Poor blind bastard could lose an arm in there. This technology MUST be combined with one of those in-the-works aroma-over-tcp/ip devices, in order to prevent this sort of awful hypothetical tragedy.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
I question how good their testimonials are. ...Penalty Box."
This guy thinks there is a penalty box in football.
From VTM:
"I have been a football fan for years...understand what the announcer means by
42
As for porn we all seem to agree how great this mouse will be.
But nobody has thought of video gaming. Imagine playing classic games like Safecracker and feeling the wheel spin. Or Zork. When the light goes out we can feel our way around until we get eaten by the Grue.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
here's another interesting device to help the blind "see".
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in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
I am so smart. S-M-R-T
idm owns me
A device that changes an array of pins based on what array of black and white is underneath it? The first rapidly animated flash site that goes over is going to end up shredding the user's fingers. With the impending lawsuits, I can see it really being the end of all-Flash sites.
That reminds me on the thing they had in X-Men.
Was pretty cool...
This is like looking at television through a paper tube.
Seems to me the ultimate blind person's access would be an entire screen laying horizontally on a desk surface using this pin technology.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~ the real world is much simpler ~~
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Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Wasn't there something that was a lot like this in the movie 'Sneakers' that came out 10+ years ago...?
Okay, while I'm not debating that this is a great thing, I have a few ponderances.
One, I understand that the field of pins acts as a representational map of an image, and reacts to color depths(?). However, how does this help on a text/image page, where there are muitiple images with different functions?
Two, as far as the audio component is concerned, what does it draw its instructions from, in regards to web/technology use? ALT tags? The NAME property? Therefore, the technology is only as foolproof as the careless web designer who forgets to fill out alt tags?
Three, wouldn't image maps drive this thing nutty?
Such as I said, I think this is a marvelous idea. However, those questions seemed to jump instantly to mind on its ability to be a viable technology to bring graphic-based interfaces to the blind.
"Moving through the masses like a fish through water." syrup
I guess that if I lost my eyesight I would not expect to be able to use a computer any more than I would expect to be able to fly an airplane or drive a car again. I don't expect that my sense of touch, and the cognitive processes that go with it, would ever develop to the level of a person who has been sightless since birth. I've read that the cognitive processes that handle sensory perception are developed in the first few years of life. After that, they're pretty much "hard-wired."
As long as we are using keyboards and graphic displays as the physical elements of human-computer interfaces, I believe that there is a point, beyond which, adapting these elements for the blind becomes futile. At that point it's like trying to make a platypus fly.
The next step, of course, is for all computer systems to use natural language interfaces, a la "Star Trek". That's what I'm waiting for!
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
Flash is a fine thing when used well. Just because there are a lot of shitty Flash sites out there doesn't mean the technology is lame.
/.
If sucky design were the justification for killing a technology, HTML would be loooong gone...damn, I wish I could use the BLINK tag on
What does it mean to wake out of a dream
and be wearing someone else's shorts?
BNL, Born on a Pirate Ship (1998)
Devices intended to enable the blind to use Graphical User Interfaces are misguided, IMHO. However, lots of information is text-based, which makes it suitable for use with a reader.
I have a friend who's blind and he swears by emacspeak, by T. V. Raman.When used with the freely-available ViaVoice text-to-speech SDK from IBM, it is the only free solution available. With it, the blind can send/receive email, browse the web, edit files... pretty much anything.
Here are the links:
"now if only we could eliminate all-Flash sites as well."
yes because Slashcode looks SOOO good.
BRRRAAAHHAAHAHAHHAHAH
flip your mouse over and surrender
Can you imagine some blind guy blundering in to goatsex and thinking 'I just shoved my finger in that guy's ass!'
Noise of gun being put into mouth
Brant
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
Ryan T. Sammartino
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
I'm going to get one of these babies, load up Photoshop, and show my wife the true meaning of gradient fill.
now maybe my keyboard can walk on water.
m.kelley
www.mkelley.net
m.kelley
life is like a freeway, if you don't look you could miss it.
This technology is fairly impressive, but I think that it should be extended to serve as a more general solution to blindness. For example, have the affected person wear a video camera on their head [helmet cam?]. The blind person could carry a higher resolution "pad" with maybe 640x480 pins representing the image from the camera. People could use their hands to "see" whatever the camera is pointing at. I might suggest a hands free device, such as one which can be strapped to a person's back, but I don't think there are proper nerves there to sense a high-resolution image.
"Leave the strategizing to those of use with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
Don't worry, I'll get the fiend in metamod.
Unmuzzled power corrupts, unmuzzledly.
In those cases, the device simply raised a pin where it saw light (or dark, with the print media) in the shape of the character.
He was much faster with the braille terminal and we finally got him a tymnet account and communicated with them on X.25 (they supported xon-xoff, and we could choke output using X.25 protocol) and he was able to use the braille terminal effectively.
I hope this device is effective, it is actually very similar to the screen reader, with the exception that it is has drivers as opposed to a light coupling (which should be more effective, since the user would not have to manipulate a camera. Then again, the user could more easily find his position on the screen with the camera).
I wonder if it has a good system for screen coordinate feedback?