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Peripherals for the Visually Impaired?
schmiddy asks: "My father, a self-proclaimed Internet junkie, recently lost most of his eyesight, but he can still see a bit out of his right eye (enough to read magnified text on a monitor, with a narrow field of view). As he spends a large amount of his time surfing the web and reading, he's been finding it hard to cope. I've seen a lot of cool toys out there for the rest of us, but can the Slashdot crowd recommend any special monitors, peripherals, or (preferably (F)OSS) text to speech or other software that would help? I think he would much rather continue reading the old-fashioned way than having to use a hack like a Braille output. Also, what about the idea of simply using a large TV screen as a computer monitor?"
Festival does text to speech in a basic but useable form.
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/
F X=0:1:9999 F D=2:1 Q:((X>2)&(X#D=0)!((D>X/2)&(X'=1))) I D>(X/2) W:$X>75 ! W X,?$X+5-$l(X) Q
You are better off with a very high quality small monitor that can be used close up and easily positioned than with bigger more expensive one. The plasma display that my grandmother uses is only 10 in. , and is on a long position arm, similar to the ones with the gigantic magnifiying lens. (which she also uses)
F X=0:1:9999 F D=2:1 Q:((X>2)&(X#D=0)!((D>X/2)&(X'=1))) I D>(X/2) W:$X>75 ! W X,?$X+5-$l(X) Q
The following programs make the console accessible for blind people worth downloading. One of the administradors of the FreeNode is legally blind and use the first one:
SpeakUp
EmacSpeak
The Opera http://www.opera.com browser has zoom up to 1000%.(some values distort fonts) You can set a default value so he doesn't have to set it for each session/window.
The free (beer) version of Opera displays small adverts, but you can choose their category.. Or you can couch up USD40 for the registered version.
Opera is also feature-rich and still fast.
Mac OS X could be a good solution, it has a nice on the fly and controllable zoom feature for those of us with poor vision. You can hold down cmnd+option+ -/+ to increase and decrease the zoom around the cursor. Quartz text is very smooth to start with so it makes it easy to read once zoomed in.
Combined with that feature, you have inverted color modes which can sometimes be easier to read depending on the impairment. The enhanced contrast feature also takes out the drop shadows on elements making objects more defined. Large on screen command keys will also overlay if you desire to help ensure that you're holding down the correct keys and combinations.
Built in voice recognition for commands may speed up the process a bit as well. Although it's not flawless and takes some time to 'train' the computer to your Father's voice.
Text highlighted by the cursor will be spoken aloud via the tex-to-voice feature, and most applications will allow you to highlight bodies of text and will attempt to read them aloud to you via the same tech.
Any simple G3 or G4 would suffice, a model that has the capacity to output to a larger display/television would also help.
Those of us with severe handicaps can benefit from this a lot, hope you find some way to help out your old man.
Gateway sold a line of large monitors such as this 31" presentation monitor on ebay. It's only 640x480, but at this point he needs size, not resolution. Also a low resolution will help with applications that don't provide large sizes. I believe they also sold a 34" 800x600. You can get them on surplus places every so often. Shouldn't be more than $300, if that, for one in good shape.
Note also that sometimes people who are losing their sight need brightness more than size, and a very bright screen, such as a presentation monitor, might be a better solution than simply buying a larger screen. Also make sure that webpage colors are overridden by the browser, and don't show background images.
-Adam
Using a TV as huge monitor: I own a very recent TV with 100 Hz (storing a 50 Hz PAL picture and displaying it twice) that also has a VGA input, limited to 640x480 @ 60Hz. You can not calibrate the picture geometry as exactly as with a high end VGA monitor, so squares look like hand-drawn boxes and circles look like eggs. High contrast test pictures (three bars white-black-white across the entire screen) influence the geometry as well. So this is no solution you want to use day by day for several hours. But it is usable for surfing and mailing. Some problematic websites assume a resolution of at least 800x600, so you have to scroll a lot. Opera in full screen mode (F11 key) is usable.
Using a beamer: This beasts are loud, need a lot of power, and a replacement light bulb costs half of a new beamer. But you get 800x600 or even 1024x768 at a screen size of 2 meters or more, depending on the quality of the beamer. But you need the room for that picture.
Huge keyboards for nearly blind people or people having trouble with fine motor manipulations: Simple! There are several vendors offering custon keyboards for electronic cash register systems. Those systems are essentially stripped-down PCs, so you should have no interfacing problems. A friend of mine (suffering spasticity) uses a standard PC keyboard combined with a cash register keyboard at work. That keyboard has a matrix of programmable push buttons and can be equipped with key caps that fit one, two, or four (2x2) pushbuttons. He uses it with 2x2 key caps, so he has the 20 most used keys on the cash register keyboard rapidly available even with spasticity, and for the other 80 keys, he still can use the standard keyboard, with a "speed penality".
Mouse replacement: I don't look at my mouse, I feel its case and buttons. I know where it is placed, about 5 to 10 cm right of my keyboard. No need to look away from the screen. So I guess blind people should have not much problems using a mouse. My friend (suffering spasticity) uses a standard mouse (now wireless, but just for fun) with no special hardware, I just slowed down the settings in the mouse driver (low speed, low acceleration). He's not as fast as me using Windows, but he reaches nearly the speed of an average Windows user. A touchpad or that little nipple on IBM laptops would be horror for him, but I think he could also work with a trackball, with a little training. We also tried a special mouse driver that used a low cost PC joystick to move the mouse cursor. It was quite usable, but my friend decided to use a standard mouse, mostly because the driver conflicted with the games that needed a joystick.
Tux2000
Denken hilft.
The company I used to work for used JAWS for allowing blind employees to use windows software.
It interfaces very well out of the box with standard applications, like IE, and it also allows you to write custom scripts so that it is usable with any application. We had to heavily customize it to work with out proprietary apps. It also interfaces well with many braille readers and text-to-speech synthesizers.
The downside is that it's expensive, and hardware to extend the functionality is also very expensive.