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Converting Images Into Sounds for the Blind
prostoalex writes "ACM News Service links to a page on Cornell University Web site that describes a technology developed by researchers to enable blind people to read maps. According to the article, the software package consists of "Java computer code that could translate images into sound, and a rudimentary software program capable of converting pixels of various colors into piano notes of various tones"."
I didn't RTFA very thoroughly, but would this actually work? Reading with your fingers is already quite hard, but that is compensated by a better sense of touch in a blind person. But constructing a mental image from a series of beeps? Seems very hard to do, at least for fairly complex images like maps.
I can't ignore that one since I do a lot of work with some of the accessibility researchers, including one who is blind. Meaningless ALT tags are more of a nuisance than a help. HTML compliance is not a bad thing per se, but the biggest problem is actually visual complexity, especially when it results in pages that take several minutes of screen reading to get to the actual content. Another hassle is tables that look great, but run in completely different directions when a screen reader tries to deal with them (especially true for embedded tables). Structuring the page well and including a jump-to-main-content link are the kinds of things that they really like. Remember that listening is basically slower than looking.
If you're seriously interested in this area, aDesigner is worth a bit of your time. A big chunk of the idea is to give sighted designers some experience of what it's like when you can't see well or at all. Sorry if it seems like a plug, but I do think it's an impressive tool... And no, I'm not directly involved.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I wonder if they could practice doing it with different voices in each ear? That would be pretty amazing...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I figure you were just trying to be cute and/or get this out of the way, but it does bear a bit more examination.
It's funny that the meme here on /. seems to be "Java is so big, bloated, slow and buggy it just sucks" when in fact it's being used for lots of interesting, cutting edge software projects. Freenet, speech recognition, game development, many Apache projects, Azureus...there are plenty of cool Java packages out there.
The fact is that the industry was badly in need of a sane replacement for C++. Java hit that niche quite nicely, and that accounts for its popularity. C# is 1) an obvious Java knockoff and 2) tied to Microsoft platforms, so it has an uphill battle to get anywhere.
One hopes that Sun sees the light and makes Java open source and standardized soon. In the meantime, though, it sure has a lot to offer. For those who doubt this, download Eclipse and give it a thorough tryout. It can even be built to native code using the free gcj compiler.
Interestingly, though, gcj generated code is often quite a bit slower at runtime than code run using Sun's JRE.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
We've got one of the Washington DC area up on the wall, with different textures for water, forests, highways, etc. It's about 5 by 5 feet.
There are others that're book sized, of the U.S. and the world. They're pretty cool.
http://www.independentliving.com/prodinfo.asp?numb er=309300&variation=&aitem=4&mitem=5
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.