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"."

Comments

Finally blind people can experience online porn

[lukesky]

Finally blind people can experience online porn ;-)

Re:Finally blind people can experience online porn

[odyrithm]

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...

What will be the sound of...

[b166er_zeroone]

goatse?

Converting Images Into Sounds for the Blind

[RatRagout]

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

One tracked mind

[lukesky]

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

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

Re:One tracked mind

[Nuskrad]

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!

cat file | /dev/soundcard

[REBloomfield]

that'd work, surely? :)

Java!?

[LarsWestergren]

"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.

Re:see no evil, hear no evil

[LarsWestergren]

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.

Listening speed

[shanen]

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...

Coagula

[arpy]

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

Pft, old.

[Sesse]

Already existed in 2002 ;-)

/* Steinar */