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Seeing-Eye Computer Guides Blind
sushant_bhatia writes "Wired News has a story about seeing-eye computer guides for the blind. This is an interesting piece on efforts at Arizona State University and Wright State University to provide features for individuals who are blind. A very interesting project is called the iCare Reader, which allows any individual who is blind to read a normal library book through this product, which 'uses optical character-recognition software along with other software that compensates for different lighting conditions and orientations of the text.' Further details on this can be found at The Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing (Cubic)."
This is a great idea, but I can see issues arising when this is used in an environment which stipulates 'no photography' or in any circumstance where photography would be discouraged. People trust dogs to be unable to reproduce images or sounds they've experienced after the fact, I doubt that a machine would ever be granted this same trust.
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
This is totally OT but when I was a freshman I had a blind neighbor in the dorm who subscribed to a braille version of Playboy. It came in a cardboard box because it took four bound paper volumes for each edition - each one was at least an inch thick. Of course, we made all the obvious jokes about the pictures being in braille.
I am curious to know if there are any systems in development to let blind people regain their vision through the use of computers/computer implants.
I work for a Major ISP in tech support, and I've heard some of these things actually work over the phone, and I'm all for technology that enriches peoples lives, however, listening to some of these calls, I've noticed that for instance,
1. These programs read absolutely everything on a screen thats displayed.
2. The people using them usually have the speed/pitch turned up to max to get through the nonsense, and therefore the computer sounds like its got the Smurfs (tm) trapped inside.
Has the technology gotten better than this or is it still as annoying to hear? I'd hate to be a library listening to that in the background...
About 10 years ago I though about a device that allows deaf people to "see" sound by looking at a spectragraph of sound waves. Researchers have learned how to read spoken words by studying spectragraphs, so I figure deaf people could also be trained. Now such software could probably be put on an off-the-shelf pocket computer instead of a custom device.
Table-ized A.I.
This reminds me of a project in Norway. In relation to the upcoming UMTS rollout here, Telenor - the largest Norwegian telco - is introducing something they call Mobile Eye Phone. It's basically just a camera, microphone and earplugs connected via UMTS to a remote guide. He gets a live video feed and can assist the blind person in navigating in new places. I've seen this on TV tested with a blind person taking his 6 year old daugther on a trip out of the country and it seemed to work really well. Given that the person only need to place a call when he need help navigating.
A combination of the two technology would create a fallback when this new technology fail. And it will fail, just look at OCR.
Look a monkey!
.. well, still working on, in my 'copious free time'.
My blind friend uses a barcode reader to scan cans and bottles in his cupboards. At the moment, the script looks up the product description from a textfile provided by the local supermarket, but we've found things like "WAT TM SSE" to be less-than-ideal. (it runs under linux, scanner plugs into keyboard plug, script runs on console, greps for barcode and reads the 'description' via festival.)
The next version, his wife will be able to scan the groceries and record a proper description, cooking instructions, etc, as short mp3 files while she unpacks the weekly shopping.
So, no more cat-food or tomato-sauce incidents when he's looking for a can of spagetti for lunch!
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Verne has the same problem; he complained about the high 'teller' charges, and the bank told him that he should use the ATM machine. "they have braile on the buttons".
Well, there's a couple of problems with that. Not all (relatively few, apparently!) blind people know braile for a start. Verne doesn't.
And the ATM machine doesn't provide any feedback.
They don't speak, and when they beep it's only to draw attention to something on the screen.
There's no indication that the machine accepted the pin number, got the right account, declined a transaction due to insufficient funds, or anything. Need your account balance? forget it!
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I read about a project to develop a portable technology for blind people that turned their environment into a soundscape (via a camera and an earpiece). Not a cheesy avatar-based load of crap with samples, but a real-time sonic rendering of the visual world. To the untrained ear it sounded like a complete noise, but to people who'd been using it for ages, it gives insight into what's going on around them. Another example of the brain's incredible capacity to make sense out of what appears to be complete nonsense.
Once I was on a greyhound bus and I talked to a blind guy who was allergic to dogs, so he didn't have a guide dog, and that was making his trip more difficult than it needed to be just because the layout of the buildings and the terrain surrounding each bus station was unfamiliar and had lots of more-or-less random noise going on.
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