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New Technology for the Blind?
Recently, quite a few questions surrounding technology for the visually impared have dropped into the Ask Slashdot in-box and I'd like to take the time to share these questions with you. Please read on for more.
Gaming Accessibility Recommendations?
openSoar asks: "I work for a company that makes and runs a virtual online world called SecondLife. One of the most inspirational stories I've heard recently has been about a group of people with extreme physical challenges and limitations who are using our software to great effect including (to quote from the original forum post) - 'the chance to be on an equal playing field for once, to not have to have folks get past what they look or sound like... to be warmly received... to play and have fun the way their peers do.' - I want to make things even better and provide a broad range of accessibility features and options. Time constraints mean I can't tackle everything so I'm trying to hit the really useful ones first. Of course, we're going to ask the users what they think but I figured that the folk here would also have some great ideas and suggestions."
Blind Friendly Open Source Software?
scubacuda asks: "A friend of mine is blind, yet he effortlessly navigates through his Windows XP box (installing programs, buying stuff on eBay, reading web-pages, etc) using JAWS. When I asked him what open source resources were available for him, I was surprised to hear him say, 'Almost nothing.' Is this true? Are we just not looking at the right places, or do blind-friendly resources tend to be Microsoft-centric? I tried to get him to switch over to Firefox, but he says that it doesn't work as well with JAWS as IE does."
MP3 Players for the Visually Impaired?
holden caufield asks: "As the geek-in-residence for my circle of friends, I've been asked the 'Which MP3 player should I buy?' question repeatedly, and I'm yet to offer an answer to them that doesn't rhyme with 'iPod'. Now I've been asked this very same question from a good friend who is blind (only *very* limited vision in one eye), and I'm thinking the iPod is still the way to go? Can anyone tell me their visually impaired experiences with MP3 players? Keep in mind, I don't mean 'can you now use it without looking at it?', since the learning curve would have been flattened for you by being able to study it originally. Any suggestions?
A few reasons why I think the iPod will work for him:
- Simple user interface
- Cursor changes can be heard with (or without) headphones on
- Bright back-lighting may be helpful for him.
- He uses a screen reader (JAWS for Windows), so compatibility with that is possibly more important than nearly any other feature.
- He is looking for an MP3 player. Ogg and FLAC compatibility is not a consideration, and will not weigh in favor of any device.
- Sorry, but switching to Linux is not an option, however open-source that is Win32-compatible is fine."
Unless you're blind.
Gee, When I click on "Read More" I get:
...
"Nothing to see here, please move along."
Hmmm
FLR
I like OS X since it also has a bunch of other features for the handicapped, like zoom, contrast and grayscale adjustments. If you're not completely blind, this is quite useful. Check out the Universal Access preferences pane to see the hearing and keyboard and mouse stuff too.
mp3 player for the visually impaired? Hmmm, maybe a laptop running iTunes and the spoken interface enabled. I set it up to read any highlighted text when I hit F8. The only minor problem is that it reads the whole line in the playlist, the name, time, artist, album, genre, etc. That would make quick browsing kind of hard.
BLinux
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Back in the mists of POPFile time a developer came along and wanted to work on the HTML of POPFile's UI (made it HTML 4.01 and CSS1 compliant) and I said "If you want to work on it then you need to do that PLUS you need to make it pass the Bobby Accessibility Guidelines".
He did all three and I have heard from users that POPFile works well with screen readers. I'm not sure about JAWS in particular.
It wasn't particularly onerous to get the Bobby AA mark for the software and I'm always happy to have another satisfied user.
John.
For diversions, how about Interactive Fiction? It has a textual interface that lends itself well to speakerbox usage, shell accounts, and there's a vast library of free titles available.
Phison (and others I would guess) makes inexpensive flash memory key mp3 players with no screen. Operation and navigation simple by necessity since there is no screen. There is an on/off switch and then a rocker switch/button that is used to both skip songs (with a quick flip) or change volume (by pressing and holding). You can find the 512MB version online for about $60.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Open source software cannot take off in government until it has good tools to fit these needs. Government contracts require it.
These tools are also the future of computers. We all want to speak to and hear our computers, we all want to use small interfaces that are low resolution and high contrast.
As far as the Ipod goes, that's a terrible idea. He needs one with tactile controls. Ideally, it needs at least 6 control buttons on it, Play/pause, next, previous, volume up/down and power. The Ipod is about the last place you want to look, as the wheel thing will do him absolutely no good.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
A friend of mine is blind, yet he effortlessly navigates through his Windows XP box (installing programs, buying stuff on eBay, reading web-pages, etc) using JAWS. When I asked him what open source resources were available for him, I was surprised to hear him say, 'Almost nothing.' Is this true? Are we just not looking at the right places, or do blind-friendly resources tend to be Microsoft-centric?
Well, as they say, open source software is written when someone has to scratch an itch. Sounds nice, but it has that one unpleasant consequence: the open source community satisfies primarily the needs of the open source community, while the commercial & proprietary software developers at least try to pretend they actually satisfy the need of their customers. Since there's not much blind people among the open source community - there's not much free software writting for them. But since blind people have money and are able to buy a piece of software - there is some commercial software written for them. I think it's as simple as that.
The original MacIntalk arrived in 1984, and was probably talking in the lab in 1983. There was even a developer's kit of sorts available. If I recall, it could speak English and Spanish directly and had a phonetic mode also.
A historical note:
I wasn't here, but I heard that the first Mac did, or was supposed to, introduce itself using MacIntalk. If true, in 1984 this would've had a lot of *ooh* *ahh* potential.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Regarding the MP3 player, make sure he checks out Rockbox.
Rockbox is an open source (GPL) firmware project for the Archos Recorder MP3 player (among others). They've done great work, which included Talkbox - extra code which can allow the MP3 player to 'talk' to the users.
Now the problem is that the actual hardware itself is terrible - that is not the Rockbox teams fault, of course, though.
I've seen on the mailing list some blind users who've written in just to comment about how helpful and useful the Talkbox features of Rockbox are. So it seriously does help people. It is an amazing project, and I really wish I had worked on it myself.
Anyway, check out the manual or something to check that it is suitable.
- Jax
For Gnome there is Gnopernicus, easy to install and it works with any GTK app including Firefox.
I can see.
Using the iPod in the car is *infruriating*, because with a WHEEL it is difficult to select one of 311 artists, or one of 520 albums.
Spin-spin-spin...backspin, backspin, click click click.
It is *difficult* to *impossible* to select an album, artist or song when confronted with 35GB of music.
Wheel-selection is only somewhat practical to select a playlist (since I only have 2 dozen or so). A wheel interface is impractical unless you can constantly look at it / see it, and you have a limited number of items to select from.
The iPod interface is *overrated*.
"You have liberated me from thought."
Very pertinent announcememt from this morning
Help fight continental drift.
Yes, yes, yes, it is true that open-source software has done a terrible job of catering to the visually-impaired. I have a visually-impaired friend who complains constantly about this.
It is not, however, entirely OSS's fault. Screen-reader developers have been working from IE for the longest time. One suspects that had OSS advocates started leaning on them, matters might have improved... but hey, it's never too late.
My eyes have this little quirk; see the cones in my retina work just fine, like everybody else (they're the ones for bright light and color) but the rods (dim light) just decided to take a vacation and not work at all, 0, nothing. The basic technological fix is well, the lightbulb i guess, but there are times that it isn't practical or useful enough. Has anybody heard of anything nifty to help my problem. I heard of Project Blink involving magnets and large contacts but is there anything else?
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
Here's a Technote from 1990:
Macintalk, the Final Chapter You can find some more tidbits on google's groups, search for Macintalk with a date filter of 1990.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
There is a standardized format for talking books on CD called DAISY. My mother is blind and I put together a PERL script that takes a DAISY cd, extracts the title/author/chapter information from the DAISY index file and then embeds that as MP3 tags at the end of the MP3s. I then load that onto an iPod so that she can carry around 10-20 books with her without having to carry the fairly large DAISY reader. Huge benefits of the iPod (3rd gen, not 4th): - audible feedback when you push a button or use the scroll wheel (clicks) - customization of main menu to remove irrelevant entries and can put browse by album (book title) at top of menu - separate tactile buttons for play/pause and skip track (chapter). with the 4th gen iPod, these buttons were integrated into the scroll wheel like the iPod mini - much harder to use - large storage capacity - each book is on average 500 MB
The generation of random numbers is too important to leave to chance
This is actually one of my complaints about the iPod. It is difficult to do certain operations without looking at the screen. The scroll wheel does different things depending on what "state" the menus are in, and there is an elaborate system of "timeouts" where the mode of the machine moves from one state to another without your asking it to. Furthermore the wheel goves no tactile feedback (aural feedback, while nice, just doesn't connect to your brain in the same way) and it's easy to move it a click accidentally between selecting an option and moving your finger to the select button.
I'm not blind, but I do have a desire to operate the thing without looking--for example when driving, or turning the volume down before I cross a street.
HOWEVER, when I upgraded I took a long, hard look at other MP3 players, and was forced to conclude that iPod interface was the best despite its flaws. So this is a "six of one, half dozen of the other" sort of situation.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
If they could read the summary, then surely they can read the rest too?
My hope here is that some of you folks interested in this topic might have some insight on a related issue with the US voting systems.
I've been a spectator in a recent discussion regarding the best approach to delivering a secure voting system to the blind. It was an offshoot of some discussions on the current US voting systems, their serious shortcomings, and solutions. So far, I haven't read what any proposal that made much sense to me - they are all either extremely expensive (ie: everyone gets a special $3k reading wand) or otherwise highly impractical (ie: convoluted, multi-step, off-the-cuff type procedures to supposedly ensure a secure vote for the blind citizen).
I'm no expert in this area, and I want to understand it a bit better. Can anyone suggest a practical solution that could be reasonably implemented across the US ?
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
My project at sourceforge is not *quite* ready for the blind yet, but its getting there. Keyano is only 14 days old but we already have nearly 200 downloads and are in the top 10% of projects at sourceforge.
Keyano does a number of things that could be used to aid the blind including a rare mix of Text to speech (using festival as a backend) the dict protocol for a handy reference, Alphabet mode (type into a text area as the letter names are said out loud) as well as a virtual keyboard onscreen so that keypress events can be custom set for the sampler.
I think keyano has alot of potential as an aid to the disabled members of our community even if it is seemingly just a "kids game" to the rest of us.
(karma free for your pleasure)
cheers!
--tb
I have the fy200 series but there all similar basically just a difference in storage space between models. I can personally use mine with my eyes closed. It doesn't have many buttons and they all feel diffrent. The only question mark is the software used to load mp3's on to it, not sure how well it works with a screen reader. There's also unoffical software for linux that works on some models. Unfortunaetly mine isn't of them, so I have no idea how friendly it is.
Print ballots in brail.
The Screen Magnifiers Homepage has a nice listing of software available to visually impaired users. As a visually impaired person myself, I too wish there was some nice open sourced solution to help me out as commercial software is REALLY expensive.
I have tried ZoomText and it is excellent. I have also tried almost every freeware/non comercial screen magnification software listed at magnifiers.org, but to be honest with you, none have even come close to being usable. Most of them offer no more functionality than the magnifyer bundled with Windows. I have not tried freeware/opensource screen readers, so I cannot comment on them. I would suspect that nothing would even come close to JAWS.
Regarding you friend's experience using Firefox with JAWS, I have run into several programs that wouldn't work with ZoomText. FireFox was one, Putty was another. The software could not track the cursor properly. These Programs seem to be mostly compatible with very popular software packages.
Absentee ballots in braille?
I'm sorry, but unless you are humorless, that IS funny. Yes, I do realize it's a little bit of a put-down, but if we can't make a little fun of each other, what's the point
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
Heh, I was just reading the KDE news bar on the left, and this came up: KDE 3.4 Will Talk to You
The KDE Accessibility team is in the process of integrating speech synthesis into KDE. Not only does this mean better support for visually-impaired and speech-impaired users, but the new features should also prove for a fun desktop experience overall.
Seems very relevent!
- Jax
There's a small company called SSB Technologies in San Francisco that my brother used to work for that helps companies make their products accessible to people with disabilities (primarily those who are blind).
Has anyone had good experience with emacspeak? It looks promising, but I've never been able to locate the software for it that actually turns words on the screen onto a voice when I've played around with setting it up. From memory it wasn't particularly easy to set up on the distribution I was trying for (debian).
Believe with me, my saplings.
I've always thought this was so well put, it
inspired me to try it: unplug my monitor and go.
http://www.eklhad.net/cli.html
My father is only partially blind, so the limited software for blind people goes doubly for him, since the software designed to enlarge the screen are all horribly written, and either take up half the screen , or bog the system down to unbelivable rates. As for JAWS, your friend must be a surfing GOD, because even with me looking at the screen with JAWS on the other day i couldnt get past yahoo! The really amazing part of this for me is with all of the software out there, you whould assume someone whould think to make something that zoomed what was under the cursor when you pressed mouse3.
Like the saying goes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -Pyrotic
If you give every object in the game a name, and you relate distance and time, you can quite easily turn a MMORPG into a text adventure that can be read. This is a primitive step towards artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence will have every real noun and verb in its dictionary, and create a virtual 3d world. Artificial Intelligence is a long way off, but wiring up a MMORPG to play in text mode could be done now if funded.
More on AI
God spoke to me.
A good cheap hardware MP3 player that I came across for visual impaired users is the first generation Nomad Muvo. It has no visual display and acts as a flash memory drive when you use it with Windows. This solves the problem of JAWS or other screen readers not being compatable with the software that is needed to transfer your MP3s file from your computer to your hardware MP3 player.
Another more expensive solution is the Book Port made by APH. It plays MP3 files and also has many different features that are great for people with print disablities such as text-to-speech so you can download text files to the device and have them read back to you.
The thing that always gets me about computer technologies for the blind is that they seem to focus on providing a described graphical user interface for people who often have never seen anything in their lives. My grandmother went totally blind with macular degeneration (of the unfixable variety) over the past ten years. She doesn't want to learn windows. She doesn't want to learn a mac. She wants to send and recieve email. Explaining concepts like windows and how to use a mouse seem awfully stupid to me.
Building computers that focus on whole-system TTS interfaces via CLI apps seems to be a much better approach. Has anyone done anything like this that is explainable to a computer-illiterate blind grandmother?
And now for something completely different...a man with three buttocks.
Ok, here's the scoop (I actually work on screen reader accessibility for Mozilla-based browsers).
Window-Eyes is currently a much better bet than JAWS for people interested in Mozilla. The current beta at http://www.gwmicro.com/beta/ mentions their Mozilla support. You have to download an alpha of Seamonkey (the classic suite) or a nightly of Firefox to get it to work. The suite is better for now, until we get some more front-end accessibility polishing underway for Firefox.
JAWS + Firefox compatibility should happen over the next year or so. It's not that Firefox doesn't support JAWS, but the other way around. For a good web browsing experience, screen readers have special navigation modes that need to be implemented per-browser. Currently JAWS uses IE-specific API's to implement their IE support, and no one wants to build compatibility with Mozilla using the same technique.
For more info on Mozilla-related accessibility, check out http://www.mozilla.org/access
There's info on all of our accessibility-related projects, plus info for screen reader and other assistive technology vendors who wish to develop compatibility with products based on Mozilla technologies. There's also a newsgroup and mailing list on there.
I keep my 'wired remote" plugged in most of the time. Granted, not very useful for finding songs - but is great for quick volumne changes, skipping songs, etc. When walking (ie crossing the street) it may be a good option for you - it also effectively extends your headphone cord which, in some cases, my be a good thing.
I am a member of a small group that is dedicated to helping game developers provide better game accessibility features to their games. We recently wrote a whitepaper for game developers discussing the issues of game accessibility that can be found here:
i li ty_WhitePaper.pdf
...and our group can be contacted directly using:
:)
http://www.igda.org/accessibility/IGDA_Accessib
The whitepaper discusses a number of topics including:
Definition: What is Game Accessibility?
Types of Disabilities and Limiting Conditions
Scope of the Problem
Statistics
Why is Accessibility Important?
How Can we Provide Accessibility in Games? Possible Approaches
Modern Game Accessibility
Current State of Game Accessibility
The members of our group have experience with both game development and accessibility technologies so we do a lot of work to help 'bridge the gap' between the two subjects.
We are working to bring a number of resources together to help game developers and are happy to talk to companies interested in tackling this very important subject.
Our group webpage can be found here:
http://www.igda.org/accessibility/
accessibility *AT* igda *DOT* org
Feel free to contact us regarding this issue and we'll do what we can to help.
-Michael McIntosh
Unfortunately, it's not free either. A visually impared co-worker needed help finding free software and I couldn't not find any decent software that wasn't free. There are very few decent commercial products, either. This is a real shame because there's a lot of visually impared geeks out there who are crying out for decent software.
ZoomText is available from AI Squared and works great with Mozilla Firefox. Unfortunately at $395 the price tag is pretty hefty and there's no Linux version. Blind charities can usually sell the software at a discount, however.
The sysadmin in my CS dept is blind, he uses linux exclusively, exept for telnetting into the solaris machines that he administers.
I have no idea what he uses, but he is completely blind. He has an audio output that reads what I assume is the output from the terminal at an incredible speed. I have never been able to understand what it is saying, but he is quick about the whole thing. Probably the fastest typist I know.
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
I'm kind of surprised nobody has brough up Emacspeak yet. Since Emacs is already a complete text-based replacement for everything anyone could ever want to do with a computer system, making it blind and visually-impaired accessable is a no-brainer.
Plus, it's written by the blind, for the blind, and is it's own development platform. Is there anyone out there using Emacspeak that would care to comment on it?
Causation can cause correlation
Bright back-lighting may be helpful for him.
;-)
The iPod's backlight is bright!
I use it as a flashlight (seriously), and the first time I turned it on at night I had to scream "AAAH! MY EYES!" (because I'm a dramatic sort of fellow
Now I wisened up: I turn it on facing away from me so my pupils have time to adapt.
You can't take the sky from me...
In all the 46 comments I've read, nobody has mentioned package called Speakup. This is a set of kernel patches that enable Linux to output everything from boot messages on to a hardware synthesizer attached to a serial port. A version of Fedora that has these patches installed is available at http://www.linux-speakup.com With this software and a hardware synthesizer such as a Doubletalk (or 10 others), one can do just about anything supported at the command prompt including email and web (using lynx or another text browser). Unlike Jaws, it's open source, and unlike gnopernicus, it works pretty seamlessly. Some really awful websites that rely on javascript, flash, etc remain unaccessable, but there's an awful lot of surfing yet to be done this way.
Accessibility is a main selling point of the electronic voting machines that worry so many of us Slashdotters. They have screen readers, large fonts, high contrast, and support multiple languages. This is a good thing for those who need these features.
Of course, a system we could trust would be a good thing for everyone.
It's really great that games like second-life can allow physically impaired people to "be on an equal playing field for once" But it would also be nice if these games offered people a choice of physical impairments. I might like to have a quadraplegic or deaf alter-ego but I can't do that in game-world.
Print absentee ballots in braille ;)
On a side note Texas Instruments were pioneers in computer generated speech. The Speak & Spell was a product of the 70s and in the 80s I enjoyed text to speech on the TI-99/4a via the "Terminal Emulator II" cartridge. I did show this to a couple of blind users and they were very much in awe by the fact that they could actually interact with online resources such as Compu$erve.
I find it shocking that technology that was available as early as 1982 has progressed so little and isn't widely available.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Why does Microsoft (for instance) not bother to patch a vulnerability in Windows for months, or at least until it's caused billions of dollars in damage to some organizations? They only seem to bother patching when people threaten to move to Linux, and in fact have left much essential functionality (security, performance, backups, etc.) to third parties.
I honestly think the accessibility features in Windows are mainly there so that grandmothers and such get some amount of emotional security -- it's yet another way Windows is "easy to use". Specifically, Grandma likes it when something says it has "accessibility features" even if she never knows that they need to be turned on, much less how to do so.
But OSS offers one nice feature -- non-programmers can "scratch an itch" by paying programmers, who can create patches to existing software. You simply can't do that with MS software -- unless the feature you want is already there or there's some infrastructure to provide it without revealing the source, you'd essentially have to hire Microsoft or hire said programmer to rewrite things from scratch. Not going to happen.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Let me get this straight...
You're saying the iPod is a bad choice for a visually impaired person, because you have a hard time using it while *driving*?
Just wondering...
Tooting my own horn here for a bit, but:
Plone has had excellent support for blind people for quite a while, and passes both the US Section 508 accessibility guidelines and the much stricter WAI-AA accessibility requirements.
I've seen several blind people use the CMS without problems, and it's quite a satisfying feeling to see that people can make use of your application even when they can't see it.
We regularly get thank-you e-mails from blind people that are extremely grateful for giving them a way to do online publishing and intranets. Web standards really matter more than you think - especially to these groups of people.
http://gamesfortheblind.com/
written by a totally blind programmer (and you thought C++ and asm was hard)
not open source but dedication like that deserves some kind of cash reward and OSS wont pay the bills, so support him, his customers and the great work he does
I would recommend to check one of the Victor Reader players we make. They are designed for the blind to read digital books. They can also read standard mp3 CDs. All butons have audio feedback, the messages are voice recorded (not TextToSpeech) and they are localized in many languages.
Of course this lets the blind person read books which are produced by the different libraries (depends on each country). Depending on the model chosen you have different options, like bookmarking, goto page, next/previous level (chapter or subchapter depends on the book)/page/phrase/ and other options are being added.
Anyway, if you are visually impaired on know someone who is, you should check out our products. Ina addition to the Victor Reader product line, we also have the Trekker, a GPS orientation system, and the Maestro an accessible handheld PC.
Creative recently released a patch for their Zen series of HD MP3 players that will allow playback of the audible format for audio books.
I have a blind friend that used lynx, bash, etc on a Linux box. All the extra setup took was just a :
sh &>/dev/ttyS0
And he was up and running. I will admit though that he is a bit of a *NIX guy, and already owned a shell account (was new to Linux, but had used UNIX before). He's not a wizard granted, but he knew what he had to.
Bored? Why not join a decent mess
They're called nipples. And they function quite effectively, IMHO.
After having had a chance to look into the blind gaming world when working on a game for the blind this year ( http://www.demor.nl ) I figure the real progress will be made when the blind can get some better tools to design their own solutions. I don't mean this in a "not my problem" way, but it seems to me they are the ones who understand their problems and strenghts best. Even if adapted computers are a big improofment over the old ways, there seem to be many technologies here (or at the near horizon) that would suit the blind much better. If only there was a bit more cash to develop these solutions, or some tools for the blind to develop these solutions themselfs.
I have nothing to say, just want people to read my cool new sig
"When I asked him what open source resources were available for him, I was surprised to hear him say, 'Almost nothing.' Is this true?" For the most part, yes. However, JAWS has a Script Manager that allows the user to write or modify scripts as they please. This certainly isn't a solution for what you are looking for, but any geek can help out the visually impaired-non geek by scripting a few solutions for them. Concerning Firefox, it's already buzzing about the company hallways and emails. If the customers want Freedom Scientific to support Firefox, they just have to ask. Like all successful businesses, Freedom Scientific is driven by customers needs and wants.
I know many people dislike Microsoft (myself included!), but to be fair to them, they have done a substantial amount of work on accessibility. It's far from perfect, but they are at least taking it seriously, and have done for some years. They have a dedicated accessibility section on their website.
Apple too, seem to be taking it seriously, but it has to be said, this is a fairly recent development for them (no doubt spurred on by the raft of new accessibility laws that have come into effect).
Here's an old article (February 2001) that gives an interesting historical perspective on accessibility on the Mac (no need for Mac fans to get rankled, much has changed, and I did emphasize it gives a good historical perspective).
Actually, Linux (and other free operating systems) work great with blind people. What you do need, though, is a serial terminal that is able to translate the text-only display into either Braille or speech.
Now... The problem is, of course, that these terminals are getting fewer and fewer by the day... Blame companies such as Microsoft and the makers of JAWS (can't remember the name of the company right now) for sucking dry the market.
Frankly, I have wrestled with JAWS quite a few times, for a friend who has been blind since he was 6 years old, and it is a nightmare to install and maintain. And my friend does not want to change because everyone he know uses Windows+JAWS, and because he uses the same combination at work.
When I think of the money thrown out the window (no pun intended) because of this absolute piece of c**p, it makes me want to scream. Especially when you look at the hundreds of free software that run perfectly well with a text-only terminal... No need for X11, or a powerful machine that can manage both Windows and speech conversion...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I haven't tested that feature myself but it seems like Klaus Knopper has some blind relative or something, considering how much effort was put in this set of features in Knoppix. I mean, I had to use Knoppix a lot for some time and I was stumbling upon pieces "for the blind" all the time. Knoppix seems to be very serious about that, down to pushing boot-up messages to a reader device...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
It might have been a bit flamebaitish, but I'd like to register the following thoughts on your post: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA*choke*HAHAHA*koff**splutter*H AHAHAHA*wheeze*hahaha...ha........whoo.......I haven't laughed like that since I was a little girl...
Yeah, Bobby has some problems, and gets a couple of things outright wrong. But the major problem is the number of things that it just doesn't get at all.
A recent spanish study found that one site passed all the Bobby tests, but was completely inaccessible. There are tools out there designed to get people involved enough to do the right testing.
If anyone speaks spanish and PHP and wants to work with accessibility and RDF, developing an application called Hera (two parts - One for manual stuff that's slow and an auto-test that is of course incomplete then llama-me ...
because JAWS has a web browser of its own. It parses the HTML after it has already been parsed by IE and renders it using textual description of the page elements with enhanced keyboard navigation for links, headings and tables, etc. It does make some use of IE API (or I assume it does, because JAWS only works with IE). This is a very shitty software engineering design: almost the entire functionality of a web browser is duplicated in a screen reader program. If new web standards are introduced, you must upgrade your over-priced, proprietary screen reader. If bugs are discovered in JAWS HTML parsing or rendering, you must wait until the next release, and purchase the new version of your over-priced, proprietary crapware. Firefox is taking a different approach with its accessibility effort: the presentation views and navigation features will be built in the browser itself, or will be available by plugin, and the screen reader (Gnopernicus or whatever) need not know about the complexities. I come from a Unix and OpenVMS background where the command line is king, and I operate much more effectively in that environment than with Windows. My first experience with Linux was with Debian Woody. I inserted my installation CD, waited for the boot prompt (the CD drive stopped buzzing), typed the boot command, and pressed enter. When the first install screen appeared (the drived again stopped buzzing), I switched to another console window and inserted a floppy disk with a brltty binary, mounted the floppy, and executed brltty: and, hey presto, I had braille output, so I could begin the installation without having to type from memory. Many distros now have brltty avaialable as a boot option, so no need to kickstart it. This sort of thing is completely impossible with Windows. (and I'm only posting as AC because big fat cowboy Neal is too big fat and lazy to get up off his big fat lazy arse and answer my e-mails asking for help in setting up a /. account. I can't do it myself because I can't read the captcha.) So, if you have been, thanks for listening!
There's not a high demand for text-to-speech or speech-recognition software with desktop computers. Most people can process information faster visually.
Perhaps if the ADA were interpreted to require employers, schools, and other instititions to offer text-to-speech and speech recognition, it would help. Of course, it could backfire: If ATMs and other kiosks were required to be fully blind-accessible, it would increase the costs and there might be less overall availability. As a custome, I'm willing to sacrifice some availability and higher cost for myself to ensure availability for the blind, but only up to a point.
Phones, cars in computers, and industrial computers may drive speech-recognition and speech-output to the next level. While driving, it's much easier for me to interact with a computer using my voice than visually. My eyes are usually watching the road, the mirror, or a very limited set of dashboard instruments. Even with heads-up displays, I don't want to have to divert brainpower to read english text output from a computer or interpret a map.
Here's what I imagine in 2010:
I'm on my to work and I want some coffee. I say "car: Find any Starbucks along our route, and if there is no Starbucks within the next 5 minutes, any place that sells espresso will do." The car replies "There is a Starbucks one block off of our route. Turn left at the next light and it will be 300 meters on the right. Shall I order you the usual?" If I'm at my home PC before leaving for work, I'd pre-order my coffee by typing. But in the car, it's voice or nothing.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
OK, as a blind person myself, let me try and address these questions.
There are actually quite a few games out there that the blind can play. Most of them are specially designed for us. For more information, I'd dirrect you to some of the manufacturers. For something that's a little closer to what the original poster was looking for, check out this, this is the closest to a virtual world we have. The majority of these games are actually pretty good considering the size of the development staff for them.
Unfortunately, accessibility is not high on the priority lists of many of the open source projects out there. Even if it were, I am not sure a huge number of blind people would switch. I'm sure us blind techies would look at the software just like anyone else, but you'd have a much bigger problem getting your blind grandmother to switch than your sighted grandmother. The reasons for this are extreemly complicated, and get into basic issues of how blind people look at technology in general. Most, however, beleive that Microsoft solutions work for them, and unless an open source solution can offer them something really compelling, and I mean to them specifically, they won't see a need to switch. As a result, most of the adaptive technology vendors do not see it worth their time to provide support for open source software at this point. Adaptive software vendors are concentrating on software a blind person would use in an employment situation, and for most work environments, Microsoft is it. Remember most blind people are not in IT related jobs, and those that are many times role their own solution. Also from my experience, your average IT person is really scared of putting adaptive software on their network. All of that said, there are some small efforts. The biggest example is the Window-Eyes screen reader, which as of 5.0 will offer support for the Mozilla Suite (NOT FIRE FOX)
For all the wonderful things I've heard about the IPOD, unfortunately its useless for the blind. There are some MP3 players out there that would work, however. One interesting product is a device called the Book Courier, which not only plays MP3 files, but also reads text and Microsoft Word files. The Book Courier will also play content from Audible, a service which sells audio books online, much like the many music download services. Unfortunately, only a limited number of MP3 players support this service. I do not know if the IPOD is one of them.
Honestly, from my perspective, the adaptive technology world is several years behind the mainstream world. The reasons are rather obvious, but still I consider the situation pretty sad. Adaptive Technology is a pretty small, but in my view largely untapped, nitch that has a lot of room for improvement.
the iPod would be absolutely ideal here as well with just a little software engineering.
You're kidding, right? The iPod is totally visual. After the 1G Apple doesn't even have a tactile feedback controller. The entire UI is based on visually dialing through hierarchical lists. It is ill-suited for visually impaired people from both a hardware and a fundamental software architecture POV.
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Well, it does seem like a troll. On the other hand respected organisations of the blind have done the judging and given out awards for accessibiltiy at pr0n industry events. Although they don't like to make a lot of song and dance about it, they get an awful lot of requests from their users.
One of the problems I have had with accessibility (a field I have worked in for 20 years on and off) is the idea that people with disabilities are, or should be, morally better than the rest, and are interested only in the wholesome parts of life. People are many and varied, and interested in lots of strange things...
Rockbox is being ported to some of the iRiver hardware.
The choice of porting is constrained by how open a platform is to open source developers. To quote one of the Rockbox developers here on
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Theirs work to get better support for blind users in KDE/QT.
At the moments it's only intergration with things like festival and not full blown screen readers.
I've also offered to sort out the kde-apps and kde-look web sites (at least get them upto bobby standards) but no reply as yet.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Just to correct my previous post, the URL is http://linux-speakup.org not .com (sorry).
As I was reading through these comments, one thing that might work is to have a small mp3 at the start of each playlist that identified that playlist?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I am the author of a free software program called im_narrator that provides text-to-speech services for a variety of IM clients on both win32 and Mac OS X. It's written in pure python and yet it uses a variety of platform-specific accessibility APIs, such as Microsoft's "Active Accessibility" and both Microsoft and Apple's TTS services. So it should prove useful to anyone who's interested in providing these kinds of services in free software.
Can your IM do this?
I was a technical manager on the CNIB (Canadian National Institute for the Blind) "Children's Discovery Portal". This is the children's interface into the larger CNIB Digital Library initiative that provides digital access to the entire CNIB audio archive, including newspapers and magazines. It's a free service to CNIB members.
.NET, even Commerce Server to provide users with book recomendations (a la Amazon.com). WMV was even chosen for the streaming audio format.
The project was sponsered to a large extent by Microsoft. They threw millions at it. Not surprisingly, the entire infrastructure around it consists of MS technology (interfacing with the legacy CNIB user data). We're talking W2K3 Servers, IIS, SQL,
The sole browser/screenreader combo targeted is IE/JAWS.
I can tell you, JAWS was not chosen for any sort of advanced features or (percieved) usability. From an implentation POV, it's a nightmare. It's archaic software that is very picky in what/how it reads. It predates browsers and does not play well with pages that are not specifically designed for it. That said, the only reason it was targeted for the project is that it is the de-facto standard screenreader for the blind community. It's been around so long that it's ubiquitous. And as bad as it is, the kids use it intuitively and to it's fullest extent. I couldn't believe how fast they had JAWS cranked up (it was reading the screen at something like 10x speed) and they jump around the page using the keyboard controls faster then I (a sighted person) could read what was on the screen! Really something.
Anyway, love it or hate it, it seems like JAWS will stick around for at least a while yet.
Here's a thread started by a novice blind user of the Rockbox mp3 player.
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http://oralux.org/ : Audio GNU/Linux distro for vision impaired persons (Knoppix based). Even if you're not interested in the distro itself, you might want to look at the various components they use. From their Roadmap: "We wish to follow a humble and pragmatic approach. First with Oralux 1.00, targeting users who know GNU/Linux or who are able to learn it. Release 2.00 will more concern the persons who have no particular skill to use a computer, whereas the computer would be useful for them."
As an engineer of 30+ years who has recently (ine the last 2 years) become visually impaired, I have looked at, tried, and cobbled together numerous solutions. Here are my observations and recommendations. Keep in mind that Visually Impaired and blind are two different things, and with an aging baby boomer population visual impairments of one sort or another will be on the increase in the coming years.
One of the Linux distro's worth watching is Oralux http://www.oralux.org/, a bootable Knoppix based live CD distro that contains an audible desktop and includes braille drivers. I've had mixed luck with this distro depending on what kind of hardware you attempt to boot it on.
Personally, I use two types of system configurations to access computer based resources.
On my laptop (Win XP PRO) I use ZoonText http://www.aisquared.com/ which is a little expensive, but does the job well.
On my desktop(s) (Win XP Pro &/or Win 98) I have a very inexpensive system. A second monitor on which I place the standard windows screen magnifier. Add Virtual Magnifying Glass http://magnifier.sourceforge.net/ and Natural Voice Reader http://www.naturalreaders.com/ at a cost of $0.00/$39.95/$69.95 depending on the version. This combination works very well for a desktop system. Add Firefox, Thunderbird, Cygwin, Putty and a few other tools and you can easily use the Web and administer your Linux boxes.
On the Linux boces (I have several) I share a 19" or 32" monitor via a KVM switch. This allows reasonable access to a consol. When running X-Windows you can simply add additional entries in the XF86.config (or it's equivalent). This lets you select the zoomable features provided by programs like ZoomText. There are a lot of other pieces availble for Linux (like Festival) but unfortunately none of these are available in a comprehensive, eacy to install set. This makes it hard for the non-geek to easily install & use these tools.
This is one of the biggest areas that M$ Windows has it over Linux and OSS for the time being.
People have mocked me for taking the time to include at least minimal accessibility features (and better than minimal where I know how) on my website's craft tutorials, especially for beading. Some people thought it quite silly that I'd bother, alleging that blind people can't bead.
Then a couple of months ago a woman wrote to me to thank me for taking the time, since she is converting patterns to a blind-friendly format by listing the number of beads by colour by row. She works with an elderly woman who has not let blindness stop her art.
I'm now in the process of converting my patterns to this format for blind users.
It's amazing what a little bit of consideration can do, even if one doesn't expect it to be useful.
Thanks for the reply. The discussion has turned lately to how someone who is blind can verify their vote, securely, and without breaking the anonymity of the voting booth. It's a challenging set of requirements !
And in general, the current electronic voting systems (voting machines AND tabulators) are bad, real bad... I think secure electronic voting machines are possible - it's not that computers are 'bad', the particular systems now are. Suggesting an electronic solution to the blind voter problem has just managed to distract people into the 'computers are all bad' arguments... sigh...
Thanks for the input !
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
but just how the visually impaired can figure out where the mouse is? i'm starting to think that GUI is good for those who can see the G part of it, but the console sounds like a better analogy for an Audio User Interface...
Use http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ festival to do text to speech. Then it's a matter of redirecting stdout to /dev/speech (ok you've got to install the speech driver) and you've got web browsing with speech.
I'm sure there are other apps available. Just a matter of emerging them
One thing I REALLY loved about DAoC was that there were the little "+"s and "-"s after you con somthing. For those of us that can't see colors, other visual clues such as that make gaming MUCH more fun! (and, you don't have to ask somebody to help you with colorbased puzzles. Which sucks)
--Xan
"Congratulations, Boots. Your robot has become self-aware. You're a daddy now." -- Dr. Rho Bowman
I work in an assistive technology facility and most of the screen reading software we see is Windows-based. JAWS has been around since the Windows 3.1 days, so it's got a distinct advantage in both market share and code maturity. As open source software gains market share, they may consider porting JAWS to Linux, but so far they don't seem interested.
There are a number of open source projects out there targeted at creating accessible software, such as the Gnome Accessibility Project.
There's also Oralux, a liveCD distro that supports brailleterms and voice output using Emacspeak.
I find the Oralux approach very appealing since it's the first step toward blind users being able to carry a complete set of accessibility tools around on a CD that will work on stock x86 hardware. Students can access school computers without the need for accessibility tools actually being installed on the machine as long as the curriculum materials are not in a format that requires proprietary software.
What would really be interesting is to see Oralux boot from a memory card like Damn Small Linux does. Accessibility on a keychain would be rather groovy, and it would free up the CD drive.
don't they have braille terminals? How hard is it to make a 40x25 character braille "display" ?
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Both braille and speech have a sequential information flow, while most software (even vi, emacs, lynx) present information in a two-dimensional way.
So it depends a lot on the user. Maybe for somebody born blind, or for an experienced Unix guy, the command line (not even emacspeak) would be great. This guy actually wrote an application that let you browse websites through ed.
But I can imagine that someone used two Windows would like to stick with Windows, especially if he became blind at a later age, so has little trouble with navigating through two-dimensional information.
Most blind users seem to find speech interfaces easier than braille. Especially since with braille, you can't read and type at the same time (unless you use a one handed keyboard). Braille interfaces are better for programming and other syntax-heavy tasks.
But in the end, to be attractive to the 'average' blind user, software should be
- similar in use and functionaly to current mainstream apps, i.e. not require remembering a lot of commands and syntax
- present information as sequentially as possible and provide for easy navigation
Try running your app in a 1 line X-terminal, to get an idea of how blind users have to navigate.
In that work I have received loads of emails from people who would like to use Firefox in an assisted way. That is why I am planning to start a new project using the same rendering engine as Fangs to create a navigatable text representation of a web page. Much of the work is already done in Fangs.
Creating software for visually impaired users requires a decent speech synthesizer. This should preferrably be part of the OS. Check out FreeTTS and the "alan" voice. FreeTTS is the only OSS speech synthesizer I know of. Does anyone know of a distribution with libraries for text to speech synthesis?
Standards Schmandards
If he's a CS dept sysadmin he probably works mostly at the commandline. As this is just text, converting it to speech shoul be very easy.
Since I am an IRC Network Administrator and webmaster for www.deepspace.org I am most interested in this question. In fact, the interest goes even deeper. It is not only the blind, but the deaf,the physically impaired, the new computer user, the elderly who are affected, errr, or shall we say, infected, but the lack of "Accessiblility" in Linux and open source. Deepspace is conceived and designed to assist all of the above listed disabled persons to mainstream into the internet. One look at our "business plan" will tell you all you need to know about deepspace.
I suggest to the open source community who care to come to irc.deepspace.org and talk to our impaired users. They can tell you right off those things that work for them. Some are even Linux users, a few are even JAVA users, although the blind have little use for most JAVA. The deaf need the text files and the blind need compatable text readers. For the most part, the elderly (I am one of those at age 72) need all of the above.
We have picked up some tools for use it deepspace but, sadly, most all of them are Microsoft required tools. One of the most note worthy is tIRC, a very functional and well liked mIRC plug-in for the blind to change text to voice. Our vision impaired clients love it and forergo Jaws to use tIRC when in IRC chat.
You will note, too, that www.deepspace.org uses HTML 4.01 transitional. We have found, through asking our clients, that this DTD is the most accessible to them. Our vision impaired user's readers have issues with some of the JAVA/XML they come across. You will please note that in deepspace.org we do provide as many of the IRC tools as we can so the user has a choice of this favorite tool. That is, we have provided a CGI:IRC client, a JAVA Client, and links to mIRC, XChat, Chatzilla, and others. We have, also, made great headway into developing a handbook for our clients; a monumental task when on considers the the above listed impaired users are about 50% of the world's new computer user population.
Yes, we are in great need for the opensource help. Please guys, do not leave the impaired user behind.
Yours,
CHTANK
Retired dinosaur, simple user, volunteer, guinea pig
I know I'm showing my geekiness here, but IIRC, they never did properly restore his vision. He got heat vision, X-ray vision, and a lot of other modes, but his regular vision was never quite right. He could "see" by using all the different modes, but it wasn't normal human sight and, at least in the books, he'd occasionally have problems with colors of things, although that might have just been a matter of him trying to correlate the umpteen different visual modes overlaid on his FOV and trying to describe them to people stuck in a 7-color world.
On the other hand, he did receive his vision back during Insurrection...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I think the GNOME On-screen Keyboard is the way to go. It's how it should be done, with hooks in the undelying system and tools that hook to them and the applications, so they sort of sit in the middle, without the need for specialist software. I was blown away by Peter Korn's presentations of GOK at euroFoo. It has so much potential both for the disabled and for the 'enabled' users. Think AppleScript done the way it should be done: with your favorite scripting language and with access to all GUI elements.
Hey maybe this page would have helped David Blunket in the UK
Then, there's the arguments that, at least until the technology becomes perfect, we should be teaching these people to learn with their disability and join that culture. The same debate has occurred for magnifying machines, hearing aids, and cochlear (sp?) implants. It's a particularly rabid debate in the deaf community (albeit a quiet one... {duck}) where they've got their own culture and language going on.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Oddly enough, the text-to-speech features are all adjustable under the "Speech" pane (4th row down, the "System" section, 3rd icon from the right, a microphone), but there is no direct link from Universal Access and vice-versa. This is slightly confusing, especialy for such a case, where it would be important to find such options all grouped into one place. The features are still avalible, however, and work quite well.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I use my (4th-gen) iPod almost exclusively while it resides in my pocket--changing songs, adjusting volume, rating songs (well, if they're worth all 5 stars), seeking in songs
How do you move your selection focus between different playlists, or genres, or artists, without getting visual feedback? Navigating within a single linear array is trivial for sighted and unsighted alike, but beyond that?
This post explains in much better detail why the iPod is currently spectacularly un-optimized for non-visual operation.
One final thing I consider essential for non-visual operation is a "meta-mode" unlimited bookmarking/breadcrumbing facility, with audio feedback. I know the iPod can bookmark audible files, but can you "pop" out of any track or number of tracks, putting a bookmark to that exact place into the breadcrumb stack, and then return to that bookmark and that track at any arbitrary time in the future?
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I think the argument is often that you wind up with the disabled people relying on devices that approximate "regular people"'s senses but do so badly, versus them using established methods that work better when present. For instance, there are legally blind children relying on magnifying devices for reading rather than learning braille. You have children with cochlear implants who never learn sign language or lip-reading. I agree that we should use technology to help the disabled, but not to the exclusion of tried-and-true methods.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
In all these discussions about electronic voting, the entire issue of the usability of the electronic voting process has been ignored, irrespective of disability. There's plenty of discussion about whether these systems will be secure from hackers trying to influence elections, but I've really heard very little about what will be done to make sure that voters (with disability or otherwise) will be able to accurate choose the candidate they wanted to choose.
We've already had problems with the butterfly ballots in Florida, where the bad usability problems of *paper* ballots caused enough people to cast the wrong vote that the entire election process was screwed up. A confusing user interface for a digital voting system could potentially wreak as much havoc as the most malicious intruder.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
If you want to help David Blunkett, then have a go at the accessible (to JAWS and Windoweyes) Flash game called "David Blunkett's Blind Panic"
at
http://www.thomasscott.net/flash/blunkett/
It's all the rage!
(from Sadie)
You want a smooth framerate more than anything (including resolution) for the hearing impaired (or so they tell us) to get good sign language recognition. Stuttering, dropped frames, low framerates (20 fps or less), and adaptive framerates all cause problems for sign language.
Disclaimer: I work for WorldGate. We designed and produce the Motorola Ojo, a 30 fps H.264 consumer videophone.
it is probably the best interface available for anyone at all at the moment.
/feature/, but is hardly "essential" for operation, visual or otherwise
Unless you're blind. Or using it hands-free. That's the point of this discussion.
you can no more gauge movement on a mechanical wheel than you can on a touch wheel
This is where you need to think different. The point here is that dialling using a radial controller is sub-optimal for non-visual operation. You are probably better off with a jog-dial or rocker controller. Or simple up/down or cursor keys.
if you spend 5 minutes to look at how the click wheel and software work
We're talking about blind users here, remember? All the UI analogies you use demonstrate your visual perspective.
I would say that your "meta-mode" bookmark/breadcrumb facility would be a nice
That's where you're wrong. Using your visual field enables you to navigate successfully through a complex collection of assets in a branchy fashion. However, blind or hands-free users don't have this luxury - they need bookmarks. That's why serious hands-free/blind systems generally have unlimited bookmarking, unlimited creation of on-device playists, and a way to embed these bookmarks in directories or playlists to create "charts" through the content.
Seriously, the iPod is a wonderful UI and device... as long as you're looking at it (or you have looked at it and use this knowledge to navigate thinly and briefly "through your trousers). Outside that domain, however, it lags badly. Try using some of the other interfaces discussed in this conversation then see if your conclusion remains the same.
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1. Console access. These include Speakup ftp://ftp.braille.uwo.ca/pub/speakup/, Screader http://www.euronet.nl/~acj/eng-screader.html, YASR http://yasr.sourceforge.net/, and many folks' favorite BrlTTY http://dave.mielke.cc/brltty/
2. Specialized environment. The most obvious option here is emacspeak http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/ but there are others.
3. GUI Access. The only real option today is the Gnopernicus screen reader/magnifier http://www.baum.ro/gnopernicus.html that is part of the GNOME desktop http://www.gnome.org/start via the GNOME Accessibility Project http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/ (though other options are being explored). Note: my day job is as Sun's Accessibility Architect, working on the GNOME Accessibility Project and helping with the development of things like Gnopernicus, and another amazing product for people with physical impairments - GOK http://www.gok.ca/.
A pretty complete list of F/OSS accessibility projects can be found at the Linux Accessibility Resource Site (LARS) http://lars.atrc.utoronto.ca/current.html. I maintain a blog on this stuff as well, which has lots more information: http://blogs.sun.com/korn.