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Converting Images Into Sounds for the Blind

Posted by samzenpus on from the your-hair-sounds-beautiful dept.

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"."

28 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Finally blind people can experience online porn by lukesky · · Score: 5, Funny

    Finally blind people can experience online porn ;-)

    --
    -- look sir droids...
    1. Re:Finally blind people can experience online porn by odyrithm · · Score: 3, Funny

      Would the sound be akin to that cheesy stuff they play in pr0n movies? damn now that's going to bug me.

      wiki wiki wha wha wiki wha...

      --
      moo
    2. Re:Finally blind people can experience online porn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      As a blind person why bother when you have winamp tv porn? Maybe it will work for reading that fucking immage to create an account, damn just use a sound file like paypal.

  2. What will be the sound of... by b166er_zeroone · · Score: 5, Funny

    goatse?

  3. Converting Images Into Sounds for the Blind by RatRagout · · Score: 5, Funny

    Will an input picture of a badger make it play "badger badger mushroom"?

    1. Re:Converting Images Into Sounds for the Blind by melandy · · Score: 2, Informative

      For the uninitiated:
  4. One tracked mind by lukesky · · Score: 5, Funny

    Just noticed that the first three post were about porn ;-)

    There most be better use for this technology, but apperently there arent. ;-)

    --
    -- look sir droids...
    1. Re:One tracked mind by Nuskrad · · Score: 4, Funny
      At least noone will say 'you'll go blind' to them.

      Does listening to porn make you deaf? I think some serious scientific research is needed!

  5. cat file | /dev/soundcard by REBloomfield · · Score: 4, Funny

    that'd work, surely? :)

  6. see no evil, hear no evil by mrjb · · Score: 2, Funny

    So now they can read maps, but somehow I would't feel very secure getting in on a car with them. "Keep your eyes on the road!!!" "Okay, if it makes you feel better..."

    --
    Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
    1. Re:see no evil, hear no evil by LarsWestergren · · Score: 5, Informative

      Well, the article uses weather maps. I have met a blind man who at a party drove a car some 10 meters on a dare. :-)

      I wonder if the brain can be trained to "see" a mental 3D image from these sounds and how long it would take. A blind woman I knew was an experienced computer user and she had her screen reader set to max speed. For me it was impossible to hear what it was saying, the reader did not attempt to use pronounciation rules, it was all just a confusing staccato of fast phonemes which blended into each other. "ATT-ECK-APP-SA-BA..." Not very pleasant to listen to, but she had no problem "reading" letters using this almost as fast as I could with my eyes.

      Perhaps children can learn to see a full picture from sounds, but I wonder about adults. I have tried a "picture book" for blind children. The images were large and very simple. There were in 3D, but very flattened of course, and always "from ahead". Different material textures were used (fuzzy fabric for papa bear's fur, rippled plastic for water etc), but it was INCREDIBLY difficult for me to "see" with my fingers what an image was if I hadn't peeked beforehand. Any attempt to include some sort of perspective would have made it impossible.

      --

      Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die

  7. Like by mattr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    SimTunes and many other works by Toshio Iwai?

    A fun drawing program in which tone is determined by pixel color.

  8. Java!? by LarsWestergren · · Score: 3, Informative

    "This could be done much faster in my favourite language X"!

    Starting countdown to first comment..NOW.

    Seriously though, this sounds great. My previous job was at the Swedish national library for the blind/visually disabled. Their lives have gotten a LOT easier with technology, and especially the net, but there are still lots of problems.

    The greatest service you can do to them is make sure all web pages you make are HTML 4.01 compliant though. Alt tags for pictures are of course important (even if it just saying "logo"), and screen reader programs are not as forgiving as IE/Mozilla/Firefox et al when it comes to confusing tags.

    --

    Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die

    1. Re:Java!? by shanen · · Score: 2, Insightful
      The greatest service you can do to them is make sure all web pages you make are HTML 4.01 compliant though. Alt tags for pictures are of course important (even if it just saying "logo"), and screen reader programs are not as forgiving as IE/Mozilla/Firefox et al when it comes to confusing tags.

      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.
    2. Re:Java!? by Glock27 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      "This could be done much faster in my favourite language X"!

      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
  9. Does it work? by Hyksos · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  10. Re:What will be the sound of... by ilikejam · · Score: 2, Funny

    That's easy.
    cat lastmeasure/hello.jpg > /dev/dsp
    It sound like 'shshshshshshshshshh'.

    --
    C-x C-s C-x k
  11. Listening speed by shanen · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Remember that the TTS (text to speech) programs are mostly developed by sighted people, and to them listening is kind of secondary. Blind people get lots of extra practice and learn to concentrate very well on the words. They actually did some research on this and found that experienced blind computer users could understand speech at rates well beyond the fastest settings of their TTS systems.

    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.
    1. Re:Listening speed by michaelwigle · · Score: 2, Informative

      Actually, it is possible and done all the time to an extent. I teach blind and visually impaired children and adults to use the computer with speech output. In some cases my clients are working in customer service phone pools. Their headset has two inputs, one from the phone and one from the PC. They are listening to and speaking to the customer while at the same time listening to and inputting information to the PC. It requires a good deal of skill and concentration but you'd be surprised at your odds of speaking to a blind person when you call a customer service phone line.

  12. Music to images? by Ingolfke · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Reversing the application so that music was converted to an image would be interesting as well.

  13. Re:What will be the sound of... by dabigpaybackski · · Score: 2, Funny

    "Oh my g--*urp.*" [sound of test subject running to the bathroom]

    --
    "OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
  14. Edges, textures and sound by art6217 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sound might be a very important way to convey images, either an additional one to textures, or replacing the textures completely. It may instantly inform about the kind of a surface. Sound might also convey edges, but then there is a problem of detecting edges: it is usually easy if the map is in a vector form, but in the case of general raster images a good edge detector or even a human that would mark the edges might be needed.
    Partly offtopic: a free software to convert images to tactile graphics using edge detection and textures: JTactileGraphics. It does not have sound support currently, but one is being added.

  15. Coagula by arpy · · Score: 3, Informative

    Brings to mind Coagula, the "Industrial Strength Color-Note Organ", which converts .bmp files to synth sounds.

  16. Pft, old. by Sesse · · Score: 3, Informative

    Already existed in 2002 ;-)

    /* Steinar */

    --
    (This comment is of course GPLed.)
  17. Metasynth? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    no one's mentioned Metasynth yet?

    It's been doing this for a long time. But I guess because it's Mac only many people won't have heard of it.

    And yes it sounds much better than Coagula, but no it's not free.

  18. Old News by jamesjameson · · Score: 2, Funny

    Albert Hoffman, way back when(1941), discovered something that not only allows you to hear colors, but just about any other funky combination of senses you could imagine. It's called LSD.

  19. Ray Charles could drive by notthepainter · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I have met a blind man who at a party drove a car some 10 meters on a dare.
    I heard this YEARS ago, probably in some car magazine somewhere...

    Anyway, some car manufacturer was releazing a new convertible, Renault I think, and had an ad campaign which essentially said that the new car was so fun that even Ray Charles liked it.

    So they wanted to film him driving it and singing.

    They flew him and the cars and cameras out to Bonneville Salt Flats and discovered something odd.

    Ray knew how to drive. He liked driving. Turns out he had an E-Type that he would drive, with his chauffer in the passenger seat giving advice.

  20. Why Bother? There Are Great Braille Maps by saudadelinux · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.