Funny cause in our research we queried a group of individuals who were blind and they did say that they wanted to be able to walk into a library and pick up a book and be able to get the information from it right there.
Actually the laws allow you to make copied books available to individuals who are blind as long as you ensure that the only people who are getting them are blind.
Actually our iCare project is not just the Reader for the blind, it is also a scene detetection and description. So for instance, if a user is walking down a street and a person is walking up to them, our system will be able to tell them who is coming as well as the fact that they have a finger up their nose:-)
As for the soundscape, I think most individuals who are blind are able to discern things about their environment. An example I can provide is a lady i work with who can tell excatly where an opening is for a door or a cubicle etc by just using her voice itself. No need for such fancy gadjets when the human being can perform those interactions themselves.
It does have to record the video stream in order to process it but it might choose to discard the video once it is done. This is an operational decision to be made by the bosses.
Thats a great idea. How about moving it to a PDA and using a Bar code scanner that attaches to a PDA to do the same thing. That way the users can go shopping too and know exactly what they are getting. Let me know how that is going for ya.
OCR technology has significantly improved over the last 20 years. I would say that the technology we are devloping is till in its infancy and an assessment of failure can only be made once we get a test team to use it. THanks for your comments however. Very enlightnening about the Mobile Eye Phone.
Yes the technology has gotton much better. The quality of the voice is, dare i say, almost human. (We dont use the Microsoft Sam etc voices).
To answer your questions:
1) We are gonna try to make the reading more in tune with how a person might actually read. For instance, we all dont start reading from page 1 so if you wanted to find pg 33 and you have no clue as to which page is currently open how would you get to page 33. These and other things are under consideration right now and are being worked on.
2) I work with a lady who is blind and she tells me that some people put the speed to max because they can get though the text faster and because they can actually comprehend all the text being spoken.
As someone else pointed out in a thread theoretically it would be possible to do that too although i dont know if my bosses had this in mind when they were coming up with the idea. Wait no they didnt. Thanks for your feedback though.
You are quite correct in stating my error in reporting this article. It does read to an individual who is blind but has hearing. I think we did consider the case of an individual who is both blind and deaf. Personally I would like to see a refreshable braille device for a pda because the long term goal of this product is to be a "wearable" device. Having said that I think the technology to accomplish that is still a few years away. But when it does become available and if I am still on this project, I will try and see if I can get that into the product. Thanks for your feedback.
You are right in pointing out cases where no photography could cause us problems further down the line. Thanks for your input. That is something to consider if my bosses and colleagues haven't already thought of this.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually we are testing an accessible website right now with our close users. This should be made available soon.
Funny cause in our research we queried a group of individuals who were blind and they did say that they wanted to be able to walk into a library and pick up a book and be able to get the information from it right there.
Actually the laws allow you to make copied books available to individuals who are blind as long as you ensure that the only people who are getting them are blind.
what way were you thinking about?
Actually our iCare project is not just the Reader for the blind, it is also a scene detetection and description. So for instance, if a user is walking down a street and a person is walking up to them, our system will be able to tell them who is coming as well as the fact that they have a finger up their nose :-)
As for the soundscape, I think most individuals who are blind are able to discern things about their environment. An example I can provide is a lady i work with who can tell excatly where an opening is for a door or a cubicle etc by just using her voice itself. No need for such fancy gadjets when the human being can perform those interactions themselves.
It does have to record the video stream in order to process it but it might choose to discard the video once it is done. This is an operational decision to be made by the bosses.
Thats a great idea. How about moving it to a PDA and using a Bar code scanner that attaches to a PDA to do the same thing. That way the users can go shopping too and know exactly what they are getting. Let me know how that is going for ya.
OCR technology has significantly improved over the last 20 years. I would say that the technology we are devloping is till in its infancy and an assessment of failure can only be made once we get a test team to use it. THanks for your comments however. Very enlightnening about the Mobile Eye Phone.
Very true. Although from what i have been told, these devices are very tonal. As such you cant get a detailed analysis of what is actually there.
Yes the technology has gotton much better. The quality of the voice is, dare i say, almost human. (We dont use the Microsoft Sam etc voices). To answer your questions: 1) We are gonna try to make the reading more in tune with how a person might actually read. For instance, we all dont start reading from page 1 so if you wanted to find pg 33 and you have no clue as to which page is currently open how would you get to page 33. These and other things are under consideration right now and are being worked on. 2) I work with a lady who is blind and she tells me that some people put the speed to max because they can get though the text faster and because they can actually comprehend all the text being spoken.
Sorry. I got the heading of the article from the Wired news article.
As someone else pointed out in a thread theoretically it would be possible to do that too although i dont know if my bosses had this in mind when they were coming up with the idea. Wait no they didnt. Thanks for your feedback though.
You are quite correct in stating my error in reporting this article. It does read to an individual who is blind but has hearing. I think we did consider the case of an individual who is both blind and deaf. Personally I would like to see a refreshable braille device for a pda because the long term goal of this product is to be a "wearable" device. Having said that I think the technology to accomplish that is still a few years away. But when it does become available and if I am still on this project, I will try and see if I can get that into the product. Thanks for your feedback.
You are right in pointing out cases where no photography could cause us problems further down the line. Thanks for your input. That is something to consider if my bosses and colleagues haven't already thought of this.