Voice Recognition For The Visually Handicapped?

MrIcee asks: "I was recently contacted by an individual who is extremely visually impaired. He wishes to be able to user voice recognition in his PC to dictate letters and to control his web browser and other software. In examining the available software (such as Naturally Speaking, etc) all of them require a fairly involved training session. The problem with training is that they tend to display paragraphs for him to read - but he is unable to see the words clearly enough and fast enough for proper training (even though he can use JAWS for reading screen text). I have seen references to Kurzweil VOICE software, but it seems dated and there is no good indication that it will work as promised. Does anyone out there have experience in voice recognition software that requires minimal or no training?"

Re:I never thought I'd see the day

[sjoplin]

I never thought I'd see the day that Slashdot went Politically Correct on us. "Visually handicapped"? Why not just use the existing word for it? These people are deaf.

I feel tempted to expand on Slashdot's "political correctness," but since I'm a nice guy I will politely correct you.

Deaf is the term describing those with hearing loss.

Re:I never thought I'd see the day

[cmdr_beeftaco]

I thought they were called ugly!

ITYM blind

[bluGill]

I think you mean the term is blind, not deaf.

Otherwise I agree. Visually Handicapped means nothing until I think about it, and then I'm not sure. Blind means something to everyone. Almost blind means something. Colour Blind means something. Blind in one eye (but other eye is fine) means something. There are many other things that can make something visually handicapped. All of the above qualify for Visually handicapped, but only a few of them will make it impossible to read a comptuer screen, though many more make it difficult.

Words mean things, when you use the wrong word you confuse everyone. Politicaly correct terms often (but not always) just make it difficult to figgure out what you are taking about, and in the end nothing is added.

As the C ten commandments [lysator.liu.se] points out: for they [Those who shout political correct language] believe that great efforts and loud shouting devoted to the ritual purification of the language will somehow redound to the benefit of the downtrodden (whose real and grievous woes tendeth to get lost amidst all that thunder and fury.

The blind have pleny of problems. Being refered to as blind isn't one.

Re:ITYM blind

[Finni]

While you have some reasonable points, 'blind' means 'entirely unable to see.' The Lions (a big fundraiser for this cause) like to use the term 'Low Vision', to also refer to macular degeneration, all other kinds of retinopathy, etc. Fidelco [fidelco.org], the guide-dog organization that my wife and I raise puppies for, uses the term 'visually impaired' as well, and they're not a bunch of politically-correct crusaders. George Salpietro, the Senior VP of the foundation, is himself impaired and uses a Fidelco guide dog, but he's not blind. He can see a few feet, with very little detail. So he'll say, "Hi" and look right at you, which can cause a little shear between your experience and stereotype.

Re:ITYM blind

[decep]

"Blind" does not always mean "entirely unable to see." There is a legal definition of blind that says if your vision, as measured by a doctor, is beyond a certain point, you are legally blind. Legally blind people have to wear glasses to do things like drive.

Re:ITYM blind

[burns210]

i may be wrong here, but you can have less than perfect vision and still drive(with glasses). If you legally blind, you still may be able to see, to and extent, but you are not allowed to drive. Legally blind people crossed over the threshold where they can see but as a whole, their vision is too poor to drive.

Re:ITYM blind

[decep]

You can be legally blind and have perfect vision with glasses.

Re:ITYM blind

[bluGill]

In fact most (98% if I remember right) of blind people have some vision, at least enough to point at the sun. However they do not have enough vision to get by with normal day to day activities. In other words most peoples impression of blindness is seeing nothing at all, but that is wrong. However for the most part it is better to have that impression and be pleasently surprized when someone who is blind can do something that requires sight.

Vision Impairment is vague. I wear glasses, because I'm vision impaired, but with correction I see 20/20, so I'm not blind. I'm also vision imparied because I'm color blind, but it doesn't prevent me from doing any normal activities. (In fact I can do most jobs that require normal color vision even though I fail a color blindness test)

Re:ITYM blind

[AlecC]

Vision Impairment is vague

On the contrary, in the UK at least. "Visual Impairment" means any level of impairment to the eyes which results in impaired ability to perform normal operations even with appropriate glasses or lenses. "Blind" is a an undefined word which m,eans different things to different people. To some it means totally blind, while to others it might mean only enough impairment to prevent driving.

To some extent, "Visuual impairment" is context sensitive. In the context of driving, it means with insufficient vision to drive (even with glasses). In the context of computer screens, it means uneable easily to read the screen - which is probably a greater level of impairment than for driving. What the term does is that the empairment cannot be fixed by glasses.

Surprisingly few "blind" people have no sensitivity at all to light - I think it is l;ess than 5%.

Re:ITYM blind

[bluGill]

Perhaps this is another case where useage differs on either side of the pond.

Dragon..

[zulux]

The version of Dragon that I'm familiar with uses plain old text files for the imput for it's training session. I'd imagine you could replace them with somthing that it also avaiable in brail.

Stick with Naturally Speaking

[BranMan]

And just go over their house for an afternoon and help them get it trained. If they are too far from you, have them find someone closer. Reading paragraphs isn't rocket science - people are by and large happy to help out. All they need do is ask.

Re:Stick with Naturally Speaking

[cornice]

The issue is that the software is trained for the specific voice. Even if someone is there to help, the phrases have to be spoken naturally by the person who will use the software. This process can take many hours to reach any kind of accurate training. It seems that it could be possible to memorize all of the training phrases and use the help of a friend for seeing the start and stop cues but it's going to be a long tedious process.

Re:Stick with Naturally Speaking

[j-turkey]

Another idea, if he's goign to stick with Naturally Speaking, is to use a text-to-braille converter (assuming he can read braille) for the training sessions.

Here [epix.net] is a link to a page that discusses some of those braille output technologies.

Hope this helps

--Turkey

Voice recognition for text requires training

[Chris Canfield]

I'm sorry, but the current state of the art in available voice recognition (Dragon, of course) is pretty unreliable on its own. With several hours of training, it gets about one in twenty words wrong. It also doesn't understand new words and many proper names, like Kazakhstan, Khomami, Schwarzkopf, etc. As long as he only speaks to people named Greg and doesn't talk about the 60 Palestinian shops burned near Tulkarm, he should be OK. Otherwise, he will have to recognize that the imputing software made a mistake (which, as you said, is unlikely), highlight the text, and replace it manually with a keyboard. And without training, that accuracy drops precipitously.

Why do all of that? He's vision impaired, he should have a friend teach him to touch-type.

Browser / Program control is easy. Get a Mac. They have had built-in voice-based program control with speakable items for about ten years now, and there are products that extend the existing control base.

The google directory [google.com] has links to a lot of speech recognition companies, but I still think your client would be most happy with OSX's recognition options [apple.com]. It doesn't have to be trained for a voice, though its full power does require some Apple Scripting. And there are many products [apple.com] that build on apple's relatively solid base, if you choose not to script "go back" to "apple-B" in the browser yourself. Having used it myself in the past I can confidently say it exists, and used to work at least most of the time.

That's more than can be said for most voice-recognition products. Bring him to an Apple store, and have him try it out. If you go to CompUSA or another superstore, bring your own apple guru to show you.

Re:Voice recognition for text requires training

[MrIcee]

Thanks for your advice. I agree with you on all you say. The gentleman I am discussing is in his 70's and is unlikely to want to switch to a Mac (not that I'm biased, I'm on a Mac at the moment myself and would not hesitate to mention it to him). While he does know how to touch type, the problem is that even super big words are very hard for him to see *quickly* (that is, with text bigger than I can stand, he still takes about 5 to 10 seconds to make out each word)... thus the training session would be hugely complex for him.

Another friend suggested him getting a 50 inch plasma screen so the text is REALLY BIG... also probably not a bad idea.

PS, being palestinian myself, I also enjoyed your analogy.

Aloha

This is a problem?

[ClioCJS]

Some voice recognition software came with my SBLive Platinum 5.1.

It worked without training. It worked for all menus for all programs, even ones not designed to be voice-recognizable. It worked in one try.

This is a problem?

Re:This is a problem?

[presearch]

Some voice recognition software came with my SBLive..

How informative.

Re:This is a problem?

[ClioCJS]

Like your post was?

Here's something informative: You're an asshole.

Please add me to your foes list. I hate being loved by everyone.

Re:This is a problem?

[BFaucet]

Sounds like you need a hug... c'mere you big ol' teddy bear!

Hmmm...

[Bob Vila's Hammer]

I would check with a Hearing Impaired Center that would have some kind of other alternative to voice recognition software. All of the ones I've seen or heard about necessitate training of some kind. Or inquire at the individual companies that offer these programs to see what they have to say.

But, I might suggest somehow having the training sessions read onto tape so that all that need be done is to repeat aloud the recorded audio that dictates the training passages. That of course would still require some help or slow process to make useful, but they wouldn't have to read anything.

I also know that most of these programs come with a 'read aloud' function that enables you to hear everything you type. You could copy the training passages into them and have them read back to you while you are conducting a training session. That could make it easier.

Speech and other capabilities built into OS X

[Pauly]

Apple has a great speech recognition and speech rendering engine [apple.com] built into OS X along with a full complement [apple.com] of features for disabled people. My father with severe macular degeneration can use my iBook reasonably well with these features and some applescripts [apple.com] built using these commands [apple.com]. I've added little scripts to Safari and Mail.app to help him out, but the Speakable Items features on their own are quite complete.

I just whipped up a script to read a selected bit of this article in Safari, save it to an AIFF file then use iTunes to convert that AIFF file to an mp3. Listen to the result here [geocities.com].

Dragon training.

[Izanagi]

My suggestion is to have someone sit by him and quietly feed him the training text a sentence at a time. Speed was not an issue last time I trained Dragon, just saying the words clearly was important.

Once he is done with that he can use the vocabulary builder (I think that is its name). This feature allows him to load documents he has typed in the past and read it back to Dragon. He could then have a brail printout of it to follow and speak.

The natural language processing problem is going to be a tricky one for some time. I know that I want a nice golden protocal droid ;-D

macos?

[burns210]

Macos has voice recognition built in, you can control your browser and it will dictate for you. also, ibm's viavoice is available for speech recognition.

IBM's ViaVoice

[himynameisbrak]

I did a presentation on IBM's ViaVoice software for a Linux event a couple of years ago. I'm not sure what the current availability is of this offering, but at the time it was rather good.

IIRC, the training was very short, but it would require help from a sighted person (reading text and adjusting microphone sensitivity). It's all Java and it runs on Linux. If he just wants to enter text, it's okay. It comes with its own editor that can do simple markup and save to RTF format. It required a fairly beefy computer for the times (I think 256MB of RAM and a 500MHz processor) but that type of hardware is more affordable now. I remember it being smart enough to use context in its recognition (e.g. "the nose knows").

PS: I was struck by one of the earlier comments that stated that your friend should learn to touch-type. I'd be suprised if your friend doesn't already know how to touch type. It would seem to be the more efficient and accurate way of communicating with a computer. Forget mice... I hate mice! I myself use the keyboard whenever I can and I'm sighted. However, if you were using your hands to *read* and you wanted to dictate while scanning some braille, the need for voice recognition becomes manifest.