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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)."
Maybe now we can stop paying for braille buttons at drive-through ATM's.
;-)
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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.
which allows any individual who is blind to read a normal library book through this product,
This is wrong for two reasons. First, this only helps blind people who can hear. Yes, that's most of them, but not 'any' individual.
Second, you are wrong that this allows a blind person to read a book. This allows a book to be read to a blind person. These are two different situations. Some Braille advocacy groups have participated in and helped publish studies showing that books on tape are processed differently that literature that is read. Those who read have better comprehension and retention of both the text, and provide better analysis of the subtext.
Being read to is not a substitute for being able to read. Teach a man to fish and all of that. Nifty technology, but the submitter and author of the linked article present it as something it isn't.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
That explains why my dog has been moping around all day. His dreams have been crushed.
The machine needs more work then, unless you actually have nine fingers.
If that dohickey can describe the contents of a playboy to a blind man in sufficient detail to give him a high quality woody then I say it's nobel prize time. Why? It's no big deal for a blind man to find someone to read literature to him. However, it is considerably more difficult for a blind man to find someone willing to describe naked women to him while he jerks his gerkin. Do you have any idea what kind of overtime the average aide would charge for that level of service?
Instead of having a seeing eye computer, I'd rather have a queer-eye computer that could tell me whether or not my clothes match in the morning.
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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.
Did anyone else misread the headline as saying that the ``seeing eye computer guides'' were blind?
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
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...
I must say I actualy only been in the computerfield cause I think its fun geek stuff..
But..
When getting real about all this, this is the best news I ever heard. This is precisely what computers should be used for. And it happens cause you and me are so stupid that we buy those silly computer and webcams we do not need, for alot more money then they worth. If you and me wouldnt be so dumb, they wouldnt become mainstream, and if they didnt this stuff wouldnt be invented.
This is the greatest computer use I heard for a long time. I realy hope it works well.
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!
Related experimental technology for the blind is also available for free elsewhere ("The vOICe"): Mobile OCR for the blind includes speech recognition and speech synthesis support. Currently the proof-of-concept demonstrator uses the GOCR OCR engine, but other (object?) recognition engines can be easily added. Stereo vision for the blind
Some time ago (in 2002) there was a story on /. linking to this Wired article which I remember as interesting. By stimulating certain areas of the brain they were trying to tap directly in to the visual center of the brain and create an image.
I also found this more recent article that predicts the technology to be avaiable in 4-5 years time.
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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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.
See here.
I'm not exactly blind, I learned about this as a student project. Doesn't seem like much at first, but long time blind users claim that they experience vision-like sensations, some of them mention seeing depth.
The technology doesn't allow reading, but is praised by users for the fact that it doesn't filter information - a video image is transformed to sound in a reversible (after training) way.
And yet the idea is as simple as fork and spoon, requiring shorter training time than learning to read.
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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Play Six Pack Man. I
If it does, and it crashed while the blind person is crossing the street, it could bring a whole new meaning to "blue screen of death".
I Am My Own Worst Enemy