Blind Computing?

moro asks: "One of my friends was recently blinded in an accident. The problem has arisen that he needs the use of his computer, but all of the interfaces for the blind are either EXTREMELY cumbersome, or OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive, if not both. Does anyone know of a good computing solution for the blind? Are there any open-source projects that specialize in this kind of stuff?" If there are blind programmers and sysadmins, then I'd hope the technology that enables them to do their jobs wouldn't be too cost-prohibitive to be brought into the home as well. So, are there any leads on affordable technology that will bring computing to the blind?

Comments

Some Options

[redcliffe]

You could use emacspeak, or for a more modern solution try something like a custom hook together of festival for voice synthesis(use a better voice though, not the default one) and sphinx2 for voice recognition. Here's the URL's:

Festival - http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/
Sphinx2 - http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sphinx/

There's a guy at Humbug who is blind and uses a linux box. Just put these two pieces of software together in some sort of shell, use lynx for web browsing, and hook together other apps. For hardware just use a multi-symultanious and full-duplex sound card, with a headset earphone and mike. Hope this helps.

David