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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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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 ...
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.
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.