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."
The phreak who told John Draper
(i.e. Captain Crunch) that one
can whistle the 2600 tone was
blind. No, really.
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!
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
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.
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).
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)
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...
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 even the blind can be subjected to your god-awful color schemes in the Apache and BSD sections.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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