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Blind Computing?

Posted by Cliff on from the who-said-sight-was-necessary dept.

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?

2 of 18 comments (clear)

  1. Some Options by redcliffe · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  2. A few ideas by Tersevs · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Well, there is a few speech synthesis programs that are quite nice, festival (good) or IBM:s ViaVoice (excellent) for example.

    However, only a few application supports speech-devices. But since its possible to use many application in plain textmode from a VT102-terminal (pine for e-mail, editors, links for surfing etc) wouldnt it be great if somone developed a braille display that you hook on to a serialport and replaces the screen.

    (Textmode rules! I do 70% of my computing on the VT102 terminal in my livingroom).

    I believe that there are some support for speech devices in the kernel aswell, unless im wrong.

    Furthermore i'd like to direct you to BLINUX

    (I use viavoice to read me a bedtime story every now and then, but found out that a Mommy is better at that - afaik she never kept on reading after i fell asleep)