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Braille PDA/Phone
awtbfb writes "ALVA B.V. has released details on their Mobile Phone Organizer 5500. This combination tri-band GSM phone and Windows CE.net PDA does not yet include GPRS, but it is supposedly in the works. Release dates are this summer. It's only been a year since this was requested in askslashdot."
Yet another cellphone to add to the collection of geek gifts...It looks good to me.
- nick
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How does Caller ID work if you are blind? Have the phone speak the caller's name? Maybe a touch pad with moveable nails that can do a sequence of braille letters? That would be pretty cool.
Now all we need are mobile PDA/phones for the deaf... oh, wait.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
I dated a blind woman in the late 80s who had a handheld far more functionally capable than most anything available nowadays (something about not having to worry about graphics...). The one she used was called a "Braille'n'Speak" by Blaise (?). Dumb name, nifty device. It's apparantly been far outpaced by the compatition nowadays (well, it's been 15 years). Basically, it's a standard braille keyboard (a chording keyboard invented decades ago) with seven keys, a speaker, headphone jack and a serial port, all in a small package. It allowed the user to interface it to a computer and use it for speech synthesis. This was the age of DOS (and BBSes, where she and most of the blind community were), so it was easy to tie into the BIOS and redirect text. You could take notes, and import and export text files. All the users I saw who used it cranked up the speed of the speech until, to a non-user, it sounded like an unintelligable warble. This allowed the users (who were used to it), to whip though gobs of text as fast or faster than many people could read. Now, if this was state of the art in the late 80s, I'd imagine that there are some significantly more advanced models. BTW - try IRC, as I've run into several VI users in various channels (VI as in visually impaired, not the editor). Heck, one of the serverops on Slashnet is legally blind. BTW - if any blind people used text2b.com or text2b2.com (those aren't web sites, they are apps - remember when dot com meant an executable file?), I wrote those about that time... I released 'em as shareware and got a few hundred bucks, mostly from schools. Text to braille and text to grade 2 braille, pretty much for use as printer filters. I also had a semiworking MIDI to braille sheet music app. All written in Mix Power C.
Finally a solution to keep people from yelling into their phones,
and you have to learn braille to use it?
oh wait, I see....
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Fuck'in a dude.
People taking there hands off the steering wheel to talk on one of these things...
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
The phone includes a one line braille display, which is essentially that.
I still think it would be great if someone got around to coding a really well-made video game for the deaf, something along the lines of a puzzle game would probably work best. Now there's a challenge for you.
Almost forgot, just for a second, that Microsoft is a marketing behemoth first and a software developer second.
Have you ever looked at how much Braille notetakers go for? They start at around US$1000 and go up from there. I realize there's a limited market for braille products and the companies have to recoup R&D costs, but it really seems like this market gets price gouged. So what's this beauty gonna cost? US$5000?
the way it was posted, it looked like they thought the askslashdot article had something to do with it being deverloped. What the hell?
Slashdot - News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. Big fucking ego.
...anyone needing one of these won't be interested in the D-Link DVC-1000 Videophone review.
And those prices are subsidized by the mandatory fee you pay on your phone bill. While I sympathize with the blind and deaf need for phone service, I do not feel I should be forced to pay for their access when FDB execs are making 250k a year.
Hi,
I have a friend who I like to refer to as a Vampire, actually technically only half of a vampire.
She has porphyria which is a disease which makes it so that when light (mainly blue and green spectrum) strikes any part of her body it kills off red blood cells in that area. She says it feels like a sunburn of sorts.
What it basically boils down to is that she has been stuck in the dark in her basement for almost a year now. The condition just keeps getting worse for her.
The condition is so bad now that she can only sit in front of her laptop for like 20 minutes or so before she starts feeling effects. And this is with two sheets of tinting on the screen and with the background of all the windows, etc. set to black and the text set to red.
Over the past few weeks I've been trying to do some research for her to help her find solutions.
This device might have possibility some for her. Of course she can see just fine, but if her condition gets much worse she's gonna have to start living life in a manner akin to how a blind person lives life. In some respects, of course, some not.
Has anybody out there seen one? Does it work? What does it do with something like a PDF? Does it require some sort of screen scraper software?
Any experiences would be appreciated. I cannot believe this post appeared today, I was just thinking last night about possibly submitting an "Ask Slashdot".
Thanks,
OYAHHH
Caution: Contents under pressure
I remember something aboout .com being the "tiny" build target, and .exe for "medium" and "large." I left windows before I seriously got into C/C++ programming. Can anyone explain the diferrence?
Here is an article on chording keyboards. It seems like something useful for palmtops; a pic and some momentary pushbottons could make a nice serial device for my Zaurus.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
More or less off-topic.
...in different colours.
Several years ago I had a friend who worked in a gaming shop. One of the things he carried, were Braille playing cards...
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Feel Me Now?
This product will make its money not on the deaf, who are few in number, but on regular geeks who realize the potential of a device that allows them to carry their pr0n anywhere in a tactile format. It gives a whole new meaning to the term "palm pilot."
Five years ago, I had to learn Graffiti to be cool. Now I need to learn Braille so that I can keep up with the latest gadget. What will they come up with next -- Morse Code?
This might actually be useful, in case you're n00b enough to take a sip from your methanol powered laptop. ;-)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
That thing looks a rather large; considering the specs sound a lot like that PocketPC phone (it runs WinCE and has an X-Scale proc), I wouldn't think it would be that big. I realize that braille display takes up space, but over a pound of space? How can you call that thing "mobile"?
...I'm just reading an e-mail message on my braille-enabled PDA without taking it from my pocket!
Between the M505 and the old Game Boy Advance flubs, they should know how important it is to have a back-lit screen.
I invented a brail phone long ago and demand this company cease their blatant misuse of my patent. Granted, our phones may be a bit different, but that makes no difference in the end. My model was slightly different: instead of a combination phone/pda, though I went for something functional yet simple.
I took a sturdy brick and welded an old brail-teletype on it. With an embedded 8086 executing off of manufacturer-refuse rom chips, it worked great. Sure, implementing the crude Turing algorithms was a bit painful, but we just claimed a "93.2% accuracy" for the devices. The blind people simply skipped over the mistakes and made assumptions as to what was being said.
I'll never forget the fond memories of those days. Watching the faces of the blind light up as they carried out their (unknown to them) imaginary conversations. Believe you me, that time I heard little Billy exclaim: "Mommy I love you too!"; I almost cried. Or that time Jimmy used his first call to order himself a pizza. Every time a car drove by he'd ask: "guys, is that the pizza man?". We never had the heart to tell him the truth. What was even more enjoyable was when he called back to register his complaint! A blind man arguing with a turing algorithm is not a pretty sight. Precious memories.
Oh yeah, going above 640Kb was reserved strictly for the SM fans. One had to deal with all sorts of interrupts etc. to 'get' memory from the OS.
How anyone ever programmed anything is still an unsolved mystery. Although some might argue that it forced a great deal of thriftyness. If we saw that kind of coding now, no one would need a 2.4GHz P4 for word processing - although the apps would probably take a few years longer to develop - or maybe more of us would have jobs ;-)...
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
what's the point of braille input if you still can't read the output?
Repeal the DMCA!
Pardon my lack of increduelty, but aren't low power portable devices exactly the sort of thing that the .Net paradigm is a good idea for? Supposedly, .Net encourages modularization so that one can easily distribute processing over a wide area. So you've got a small portable wirless device which, necessarily, has to have low power consumption, which means it has to have a relatively weak processor. So if you utilized faster computers on the other end of that wireless connection, you might be able to have that wireless device perform operations you wouldn't otherwise expect it to be able to do.
Granted, this device does not do anything remotely requiring such a thing (or even requiring WinCE), but I have to be the devil's advocate every now and then. The price of being a cynic.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
I assume that this is device for the users that can hear, otherwise it wouldn't have a headset. Then wouldn't it be easier if the phone just read memos, appointments, SMS messages and so on?
On the other hand, people who are both deaf and blind probably need a pager rather than a cell phone.
I also feel CE.net is an overkill for what the device is doing. Think about it, most of CE code is *visual* user interface.
Now all we need are mobile PDA/phones for the deaf... oh, wait.
About two decades ago I read about how some researchers tought themselves to read sound-frequency charts (on paper) and know what the speaker was saying. I then conceived of using a portable Newton-like device to display such graphs in real-time. Deaf people could learn to interpret such charts to know what people are saying.
Sample illustration of device
Table-ized A.I.
Great. It's bad enough when the sighted try to drive and talk on their cellphone/PDA combos at the same time. I can only imagine what's going to happen to our nation's roadways once the blind drivers start doing the same...
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
Braile guns for blind soldiers
here
Actually, the current problem for deaf mobile phone users is that while most modern mobile phones and networks support TTY signals (as required by the FCC), there is still no phone with an integrated TTY. As such, you need to carry a portable TTY with you and plug it into the phone. The fact that the most commonly used TTY protocol is well below typical modem speeds (I can type faster than the text is transmitted) adds to the technical challenge.
Furthermore, some phones produce unwanted interference in nearby hearing aids and cochlear implants. Not all mobile phones play nice with HA's and CI's either so users often have to employ T-Coil neckloops or direct jacks.
And if you think moveable nails are neat
I do... you wanna taste of my railgun? >:-)
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
What you say about my momma!?
You sick bastard.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
ok, it costs $5k.
But lets be honest, outside the world of vision, with monitors, LCD screens and so forth there hasn't been hardly any headway made for the other senses.
I'd like to see this stuff on my Zaurus, on my keyboard, on the TV and everywhere.
Thanks blind people, at least you make it happen.
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Can you feel me now?
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