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.

And now the constraints on the software side:

• 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."

Comments

OS X works for me

[mr100percent]

I beta tested some of Mac OS X's spoken user interface. The current version in 10.3 Panther is excellent, built right into the OS. It reads the text under the mouse, dialog boxes, has a variety of high-quality voices, and comes with basic speech recognition for launching apps and running scripts. The last feature has been there since 7.5, Mac users for years have been (frustrated with) using the "tell me a joke" voice script. Tiger looks like it will have even more, but Panther has a lot already.

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.

Re:OS X works for me

[mr100percent]

I was even able to post to slashdot with it, it would speak the text I was typing in, and recite the names of the buttons I was mousing over, ie. "Submit."

Re:OS X works for me

[BWJones]

I work in vision research. While we are making advancements in vision rescue and understanding of processes that occur in retinal degenerations, we are some years off from a true rescue. Therefore, technologies such as the ones offered through OS X are going to be significant to our patients who are currently having to deal with vision loss.

Of course Apple was having to work on their accessibility issues for federal approval, but not only are they are going far beyond the absolute base requirements, they have made the same OS a productive work environment for scientific research as well. Therefore, I am more than happy to try and integrate OS X into patient education and use as well as in my basic science research in the lab.

P.S. There is a movement within the National Library for the Blind to replace all of their "books on tape" with a digital format compatible with .mp3 and the iPod would be absolutely ideal here as well with just a little software engineering.

Re:OS X works for me

[Spy Hunter]

There has recently been a a bunch of great work work on integrating speech synthesis software with KDE. You can read about it here: "KDE 3.4 Will Talk to You". It's not yet ready for completely blind users but the plan is for KDE 4.0 to support blind users. Plus, it's just cool to have your computer talk.

Re:OS X works for me

[LiquidCoooled]

This thing about mp3 players for the blind got me thinking.
At some point or another, we have all (most likely) had an original tape walkman.
Could you operate that from your pocket without pulling it out?

An iPod is designed to be held in your hand and played with - like a modile phone or a deck of cards, its not designed for use whilst tucked away.
It seems like styling and design has overtaken functionality.
Maybe, it could be recaptured by allowing a simplified clicker interface on the pod, sacrifice extra faffing and scrolling and sorting for real straight forward play controls.

Re:OS X works for me

[Forge]

Mouse over is useless for blind people. It's a neat trick for sighted beta testers however.

Re:OS X works for me

[mr100percent]

It is, however, useful for nearly-blind people. People can use a Mac without reading glasses with these sort of features.

Re:OS X works for me

[Mr. Shiny And New]

The difference is that tape is a linear format, with a handfull of songs, and is very mechanical. So big mechanical buttons are practically required, and also there are only a handful of possible functions, and there's no way to search for songs or categorize or anything. mp3 players typically have more features (but require you to look at them) because they are non-linear, and they have lots of songs, and potentially lots of extra things that can be done once you're holding a computer in your hand.

So since we CAN sort and categorize music, and we HAVE to be able to search or something, an mp3 player usually provides something more than just basic cd-player controls. And bigger, more physically present buttons would just take up too much space when most mp3-players are trying to become so small you can fit it in your nose (painlessly).

As for blind people, I expect they will be constrained, like they are now, with other electronic devices, to a few brands that make larger devices or blind-friendly devices. My mother-in-law is nearly blind, and the tape deck she uses for books-on-tape is huge, I'm sure in no small part due to the fact that blind people have to feel their way around it. A tiny device with a handful of tiny, non-descript buttons would not be that helpful.

I think blind people will be (sadly) marginalized until we can cure blindness, a la Geordi La Forge on Star Trek.

Re:OS X works for me

[LiquidCoooled]

Why shouldn't I be able to play and control my media in a linear fashion?
The attraction of a large media player to me would be "plays as much stuff as the radio, but I can choose what to listen to".

Simple skip buttons for Song/Folder would be enough for me. Sure, that way, I lose the pointless searching for music, and get on with playing it.

I wouldn't have put the music on the device if I didn't like it, and at the point of putting it on, I can do whatever searching and arranging I want.

I have winamp on now, and I haven't done anything with it for days because it just plays my music. If I don't like a particular track, I skip it, if I don't like a genre just I move further down the playlist.
Its got hours and hours of none repeating music on a semi random playlist. Why would I need to search?

I think the chunkiness thinking sounds about right, and small illogically designed devices you must actually look at to use are just impractical anyway. A good example of this is with a horrible rectangle remote control for a tv. Good ones are ergonomically styled and based mainly on tactile feedback.

Blind + Linux = BLINUX

[GillBates0]

BLinux

POPFile

[JohnGrahamCumming]

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.

Re:POPFile

[zoeblade]

"If you want to work on it then you need to do that PLUS you need to make it pass the Bobby Accessibility Guidelines".

Beware that just because something passes Bobby, it doesn't necessarily mean it's completely accessible. As the W3C themselves point out, there is no automated test that can prove or disprove that your site is accessible. Several people have come up with accessibility checklists, however, which are a good place to start (as is Bobby, for that matter; it's just not a good place to finish).

Interactive Fiction

[Feneric]

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 mp3 player

[John Harrison]

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.

US Govt contracts requires good tools

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:US Govt contracts requires good tools

[Alan Cox]

This is correct, and in some other countries beyond even that. Eg in the UK all business web sites have to be accessible. Sadly it needs a bit of enforcement yet (and the government to get its own house in order)

The unfortunate rider is "except where it is illegal". Eg I can't use decss to make a DVD player for epileptics that filters out flashing video, or various other similar things. Apparently the right of the MPAA exceeds the rights of the epileptics.

And then we have ebooks..

"Bitkeeper doesn't pirate movies - people do"

Sad truth

[briancnorton]

In grad school I spent a lot of time on these sorts of things. The infrastructure for the blind is windows only. Some courageous souls work on Macs, but that's about it.

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.

Re:Sad truth

[MattyIce]

Speaking from experience (I've been blind since birth), Windows so far has the best accessibility using a text-to-speech interface. Web-browsing with IE is painless and most other Windows apps are farily easy to use with either JAWS or Window-Eyes. It is true that Firefox does not work well with screen reading applications (JAWS/Window-Eyes) but a beta of Window-Eyes and Mozilla (1.8) shows some promise. The iPod is not a viable option since it requires knowing what is on the display; the wheel does not have any stops so it is nearly impossible to know how many options you have scrolled past and there is no feedback other than pointless clicks. The best audio player would not have a display--I've seen some like this in the past and I've heard the iPodFlash will have no display so that may be viable. Speakup is an open-source project to provide text-to-speech from boot-up to shutdown. I have not used it at all at this point (I primarily use ssh to access my Linux machines) but there is a thriving user community and plenty of support. Gnome 2.4 and above has a screen-reader called Gnopernicus which is supposed to work with OpenOffice and Mozilla. I just installed this on my Gentoo box last weekend and have not done any testing yet but again, there are mailing lists etc. so if you are technically competent, this might be an option. If you google for Speakup, Gnopernicus, YASR, etc., you should be able to find plenty of resources. Hope this helps.

Itch & Scratch

[Trurl's Machine]

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 Mac, speaking English since 1984

[davidwr]

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.

RockBox

[JaxWeb]

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.

Re:RockBox

[JaxWeb]

Okay, I notice the offical docs doesn't mention it, however the Wiki does here.

For those not bothered to click the link, an interesting cut from it:

• How extensive is Rockbox's support for blind users?
  
  The Archos Jukebox is an embedded device and as such there are space limitations to what can be done to support blind accessibility within Rockbox. All of the configuration options have voice prompts, and Rockbox can speak directory and file names, but in general informational messages displayed on the screen and detailed debugging information are not available to blind users. For the Recorder, specifically, the quick settings menus are not spoken - although they can still be used by memorising what each key does while in these modes. Sorry.
  
  Rockbox is however fully usable and configurable by the blind, and many sighted users are using the voice user interface by preference so they can operate their Jukebox without looking at the screen - while driving, for instance (isn't that reassuring?).

Gnome has screen reading support

[ShOOf]

For Gnome there is Gnopernicus, easy to install and it works with any GTK app including Firefox.

iPod?!

[Chriscypher]

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*.

More history on Macintalk - Apple Technote PT22

[davidwr]

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.

Using iPod for talking books

[mattrwilliams]

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

Here's one to ponder - voting system for the blind

[Dave21212]

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 ?

Re:Here's one to ponder - voting system for the bl

[Takehiko]

Print ballots in brail.

The Screen Magnifiers Homepage

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Don't forget KDE

[JaxWeb]

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!

Command Line is Best for Blind Users

[jefe289]

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

Virtual Worlds for the blind

[CrazyJim1]

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

Non-GUI UI

[Cranston Snord]

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?

ZoomText is better than JAWS

[Zerbey]

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

[Raunch]

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.

Emacspeak

[algae]

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?

how about character-based linux on a speech synth?

[edgreenberg]

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.

Why is everyone perfect in game-world?

[MonsoonDawn]

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.

Texas Instruments - speaking English since 1980

[zakezuke]

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.

Clarification

[joranbelar]

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...

Depends on the person I guess....

[chrisopherpace]

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.

Re:emacspeak

[shizzle]

My 12-yr-old son has been using Emacspeak for about two years now. It was a pain to set up as we are using the IBM ViaVoice TTS engine that was available for Linux for a while (but no more, even back then), meaning that I had to scrounge around and make do with some outdated zip files. The situation was also complicated by the fact that I was trying to use the somewhat broken built-in Via audio; things got much easier when I put in a cheap but authentic soundblaster card. Using a free software TTS engine like Festival wasn't quite ready for prime time back then, but I hope that by now it's a reasonable option.

So far we've just been using Emacspeak & Linux for me to teach him basic programming in Python; it's been great so far. We are just embarking on Emacs Lisp, partly for him to learn a different language, and partly so we can customize emacspeak should we find the need. FYI, he also uses JAWS on Win98 for web browsing and email (too many $$ to upgrade to the version of JAWS that runs on XP, unfortunately). He dual boots himself; adding a bunch of ctrl-Gs to the LILO prompt string lets him know when he reaches the prompt, and then he just hits 'w' for Windows or 'l' for Linux. I put some ctrl-G's in /etc/issue also so he knows when he gets to the login prompt. His .bash_profile sets some environment variables and runs emacspeak directly. He uses dired to manage his files.

Someday I'd like to get him up with reading email and surfing the web in emacspeak too, but I haven't had the time to get that set up.

BTW, related to another topic, I just heard about Rockbox a few days ago from another Slashdot post, so I bought an Archos Ondio off of Ebay with hopes of getting that working for a Christmas present. (Glad he doesn't read Slashdot himself, though it's probably just a matter of time!)

Bobby not the be-all

[chaals]

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 ...

I'm blind myself

[rshugart]

OK, as a blind person myself, let me try and address these questions.

1. games for the blind
2. 
   

   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.

   
   
3. open source software
4. 
   

   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)

   
   
5. MP3 players
6. 
   

   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.

JAWS *IS* the unfortunate standard.

[jbabco]

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.

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, .NET, even Commerce Server to provide users with book recomendations (a la Amazon.com). WMV was even chosen for the streaming audio format.

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.

Rockbox Thread by New Blind User

[meehawl]

Here's a thread started by a novice blind user of the Rockbox mp3 player.

Not until the OS has a decent speech synthesizer

[StandardsSchmandards]

I am developing a Jaws emulator for Firefox called Fangs. Fangs is GPL and targeted at sighted web developers to help them understand how a web page is rendered by a commonly used screen reader. As a side effect it helps Jaws read Firefox pages in a similar way to how it reads IE pages.

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?