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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?"
I used to have a prof in college with a similiar problem. He was legally blind but still teaching (Comp Sci).
.25 inches high.
His solution was to use a very large monitor (for the time), something like a 21" with the text magnified to a point that was comfortable for him. Basically the text was about
I think I would've begun to lose sight in MY eyes trying to work from his screen but it seemed to work for him.
Yes, although a large projection TV would be fine (with line doubling, aka deinterlacing). Preferably with D-Sub or DVI input. This would go a long way towards quality. You don't need to go for high-end, as you need a lower resolution (like 800x600) to achive large type.
DLP and LCD projector and back-projection TVs also have the advantage that he will not be showered in radiation...
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Those "useability" tools in OSX and XP suck for the visually imparied. Those tools were written by sighted people unable to comprehend how a person with partial sight would use a computer. Basically the whole windowing/desktop paradigm does not work well.
A large high quality magnifying glass is far better then any of the screen magnifiers. With a magnifiying glass it is possible to use some positional information from the screen because the user can determine where the magnified part of the screen is in relation to the rest.
I have found that text based tools can work better then GUI based. With text based tools it is easier to blow up the font to 2 inch high letters (and larger). This works well with a minimal window manager with no overlapping windows like ion or ratpoison. GUIs tend to waste too much screen space, especially when you increase the font size. With a magnifying glass the buttons and icons don't need to be huge.
There is a screen reader for emacs, but I have not used it. My client is partially deaf as well.
If your father has recently lost most of his eyesight through "natural" causes, it will probably only get worse, unfortunately. I have a blind friend who did this very thing, but fortunately was smart enough to learn braille. Now he is totally blind, and uses a VB II (Versa Braille 2, very old serial braille machine) to surf the net. I set him up with a Linux box (he already knew *NIX), and just redirected STOUT, and STDERR to the VB (sh &2>/dev/ttyS0). He now loves it, but before used a voice system where the program (EEyes if I remember correctly) would tell him where the mouse position was, and what text it hovered over. EEyes was for win32 only.
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I once tried Jaws for a project at school. It worked as planned, but any normal human being will soon become sick of the irritating Commadore 64 computer voice. Actually, I remember no difference between the speach in Commadore and the one in Jaws.
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Thanks for all the responses folks, I really appreciate it.
I was surprised, and happy, to see the link to that big Gateway monitor (too bad for WA only).. I've never seen monitors over 21-22" before, and even those are usually mondo-expensive and aimed towards graphic designers and so forth.
I'm not sure yet whether I'm gonna have to set him up with a real big monitor/TV or depend on software for magnification/text to speech because we're not sure how bad his vision is going to get. . he went from being a regular glasses-wearer to near blind in like a week, was kind of scary. Makes me really value my health at this point.
Anyway thanks for all the suggestions, got to run to class so haven't been able to follow around all the links but I'll get around to it. Thanks!
P.S. Also, I appreciate the idea of the big keyboards.. I've seen them in my googling, but hadn't really thought much of them. But I don't think me dad ever learned to touch-type as well as he should have by this point, so he could probably use one of them.
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I put together a magnifier and color compression utility for Windows that might be useful, but it's experimental rather than a production app - unless he has color deficiencies (e.g. the blue-colorblindness associated with diabetes) then you'll do better with the built-in magnifier in windows or other software available on the internet.
I've thought about making a simple application using a standard web camera and blowing up the image from it to full screen.. Right now there are a lot of proprietary systems out there for doing such though that might be useful.
I write code.
I have a friend with retinitis pigmentosa who is legally blind, but has some vision left. He was running a Windows box with a few tricks: a high-contrast color scheme with a black background and gaudy purple and yellow text & widget decorations. He also used a text magnifier and a tool that snapped the mouse cursor to the middle of the screen when he middle-clicked (he frequently lost the mouse cursor.) He also had a hardware speech synthesizer, with text-to-speech software that would read icon labels when he moused over them, read web pages, emails, documents, etc.
For an open-source solution, you might want to try Festival, an open-source speech synthesis system.
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