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."

OS X works for me

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 [apple.com], 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

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."

The Mac, speaking English since 1984

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.

More history on Macintalk - Apple Technote PT22

Here's a Technote from 1990:
Macintalk, the Final Chapter [apple.com] You can find some more tidbits on google's groups, search for Macintalk with a date filter of 1990.

Texas Instruments - speaking English since 1980

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 b

Re:OS X works for me

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

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 [kde.org]". 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.

Blind + Linux = BLINUX

BLinux [leb.net]

Don't forget KDE

Heh, I was just reading the KDE news bar on the left, and this came up: KDE 3.4 Will Talk to You [kde.org]

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 speec

POPFile

Back in the mists of POPFile [getpopfile.org] 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 [watchfire.com] 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

"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 [w3.org] themselves point o

Interactive Fiction

For diversions, how about Interactive Fiction [ifarchive.org]? It has a textual interface that lends itself well to speakerbox usage, shell [shelltown.com] accounts, and there's a vast library [ifarchive.org] of free titles available.

Phison mp3 player

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.

Sad truth

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.

Itch & Scratch

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.

RockBox

Regarding the MP3 player, make sure he checks out Rockbox [rockbox.org].

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

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

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?).

iPod?!

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*.

Clarification

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...

Using iPod for talking books

There is a standardized format for talking books on CD called DAISY [daisy.org]. 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

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 ?

The Screen Magnifiers Homepage

The Screen Magnifiers Homepage [magnifiers.org] 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.

Non-GUI UI

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

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 [aisquared.com] 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

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.