But speech-synth does have some drawbacks, especially for reading a book—the voice can be annoying, for one thing, getting in the way of immersion into the book (which is why I could never really stand to have any of the speech-synth capable devices I’ve tried read aloud to me for very long). And it keeps you from hearing other things in the environment if you’re using earphones—even more problematic for blind people, who don’t have peripheral vision—or could annoy other people if you don’t.

However, one designer has come up with a concept that could change that, if it ever goes into production. The “Haptic Braille” device, winner of a 2010 Red Dot award, is a capsule-shaped mouse-like gadget that contains a scanner in the bottom, and a set of braille-making pins in the top. A user would run it over the pages of a printed book, and it would OCR, recognize, and translate the letters into braille on the top of the gadget.

It’s just a concept at the moment, and is unclear when or if it will go into production. But as a general idea, Haptic Braille could do a lot to help the blind read printed books, or newspapers, or magazines, rather than the electronic media that is easy for them to process through speech-synth right now.

(Found via Tom’s Guide.)

Last Wednesday, my life changed forever. I got an iPhone. I consider it the greatest thing to happen to the blind for a very long time, possibly ever. It offers unparalleled access to properly made applications, and changed my life in twenty-four hours. The iPhone only has one thing holding it back: iTunes. Nevertheless, I have fallen in love. …

I have seen a lot of technology for the blind, and I can safely say that the iPhone represents the most revolutionary thing to happen to the blind for at least the last ten years. Fifteen or twenty years brings us back to the Braille ‘n Speak, which I loved in the same way, so have a hard time choosing the greater. In my more excitable moments, I consider the iPhone as the greatest thing to have ever happened to the blind, and it may prove so. Time will tell. The touchpad offers the familiar next/previous motion which the blind need, since speech offers one-dimensional output. Adding the ability to touch anywhere on the screen and hear it adds a whole other dimension, literally. For the first time, the blind can actually get spacial information about something. In the store, Mom could say “Try that button” and I could. Blind people know what I mean. How many times has a sighted person said “I see an icon at the top of the screen?” Now, that actually Means something. I want to find a way to
browse the web with a touchpad on my computer. It truly represents the wave of the future.

We already covered the National Federation of the Blind commending Amazon on the new accessibility features of the 3rd generation Kindle. Here’s what Ars has to day about the iPad:

Similarly, the iPad excels in this area, thanks largely to its sort-of-computer status and Apple’s accessibility support in the OS. Screen reading is not a setting within the iBooks app, but the iPad itself—users can turn on VoiceOver so that every object, menu item, and line of text is read aloud, and the speed of reading can be adjusted to the user’s taste as well as the use of phonetics and pitch changes. When typing (say, if you’re making a note in a book), the device can also read aloud the keyboard characters you’re typing, as well as suggested spelling corrections.

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) today commended Amazon on the unveiling of a new, accessible Kindle. Amazon announced Wednesday that the new Kindle will come equipped with a voice guide that reads all menu options aloud so blind and other print-disabled people can navigate the device menus.

Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said: “We commend Amazon on the unveiling of a new Kindle that blind and print-disabled people can use. In order to compete in today’s digital society, blind and print-disabled people must be able to access the same reading technologies as the sighted. The National Federation of the Blind has long been urging Amazon to make its reading device accessible, and we are pleased that our efforts have come to fruition.”

More information available in the Engadget article this is taken from.

The notion of a camera coming to the iPod Touch is not a new one. Rumors of an iPod Touch camera abounded last year, sparked by an Apple job posting “looking for a Camera Engineering Project Manager (EPM) to drive the design, development and integration of camera modules across iPhone and iPod”.

So perhaps the rumors were just a year early. We’ve certainly seen the “design, development, and integration” of a new camera module into the iPhone, with the iPhone 4. It should stand to reason that the iPod Touch should be next. Certainly, given that FaceTime can only be used over wifi now, it should be just as usable with the iPod Touch as with the iPhone (though as AppleTell points out, they’ll have to come up with something other than phone numbers to use as identifiers for iPod Touch FaceTimers).

The addition of a camera could have implications other than just FaceTime, of course. iPod Touch owners could use the augmented-reality apps that are becoming all the rage, and it would also mean that OCR-for-the-blind applications (such as the one we covered here) could be developed for the iPod Touch. For that matter, OCR applications could be developed for the sighted, as well. (There are already services such as Evernote that will OCR and index the text of photos stored on their servers, after all.)

On a related note, AppleTell also reports on a tiny square Apple touchscreen, 1.7” in diameter, whose photos have started circulating online. Will future Mac laptops be getting touchscreen touchpads? Are the iPod Classics going to get touchscreens (and if so, will anyone try e-reading on them)? Or is it just a prototype that will never actually see the light of day? It’s going to be interesting finding out.

“When it comes to embedding accessibility, Apple has set the standard in recent years,” said Robin Spinks, principal manager of digital accessibility at the RNIB. “It is now up to other manufacturers to follow their lead.”

The features cited include the ability to increase the size of text, option to change the color of the screen background and text and the ability to read out the words on the screen.

Less than 10 percent of Canada’s 830,000 vision impaired people can read braille. New technology, such as JAWS (Job Access With Speech) is gaining popularity and obviating the need for braille in many cases.

Nevertheless, the braille advocates are still there:

“What braille allows is for someone to gain literacy, to gain an understanding of sentence structure and grammar. Computer technology doesn’t replace how to learn to write, to spell, what punctuation is. Braille is that tool for literacy,” he says.

People with vision loss already face an unemployment rate of a staggering 70 per cent, Rafferty notes. That likelihood is worsened if a blind person doesn’t read braille. He says studies have shown that a visually impaired person who knows braille is much more likely to move to higher education and to become employed than someone who relies on voice synthesizers.

“Braille is critical for gaining knowledge of literacy and moving into successful employment. For anyone born blind or partially sighted as a youth, it provides them with a significant amount of additional learning,” says Rafferty.

However, the iPad is a boon to the blind, says the article. I must admit that I didn’t know this about the Apple interface, even though I have two MacBooks. The picture above is a screen shot from my MacBook Air:

… all iPads have a standard application called VoiceOver, which allows for audible control of every single menu, even those included in third party applications. NFB has commended Apple for producing a device that is usable right out of the box for both seeing and the visually impaired alike. The NFB statement even mentions that the touch-screen “need not be a barrier” to the blind.

Computer nerds, tech columnists and the general public may not know where the iPad fits into the existing media consumption landscape–but the blind and visually impaired see it as the only e-reader worth owning. Call it further proof that Apple is more than just a pretty face.

A company called LookTel is in the beta stage of bringing something similar to Windows Mobile camera phones. The device will speak aloud text (package labels or street signs) or identify currency within its field of vision; snapshot-OCR magazine articles, book pages, and so forth; and allow adding voice tags to patterned labels that can be applied to containers and other objects without speakable text.

According to the article, it will even allow the user to provide a remote feed of the camera to someone else to get assistance.

The three-minute video showing the software in action (embedded below the jump) is pretty impressive. This could be one of the first really affordable handheld assistance devices for the visually-impaired.

… [a recent download] marked the one millionth piece of reading material delivered by the Braille and Audio Reading Download (BARD) service, a new initiative from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS), Library of Congress. Formally launched on April 30, 2009, BARD quickly became popular. Today more than 15,000 of NLS’s more than 800,000 patrons are registered for access. … The next stage in BARD’s development is to transfer administrative control from NLS to state and local libraries serving blind and physically handicapped readers. …

(via Resource Shelf)

Classics titles selected for the February Free Download Program are Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, Middlemarch by George Eliot, The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, and Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy.

You will need Real Player to listen.

(via Resource Shelf)

The settlement agreement among the parties was reached in light of several factors, including: (1) ASU’s commitment to providing access to all programs and facilities for students with disabilities, including students who are blind or have low vision; (2) the fact that the pilot program will end in the Spring of 2010; (3) Amazon and others are making improvements to and progress in the accessibility of e-book readers; and (4) the university’s agreement that should ASU deploy e-book readers in future classes over the next two years, it will strive to use devices that are accessible to the blind.

(via Resource Shelf)

Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of blindness that it has assumed a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two from their faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement for the blind. Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille to Abraham Lincoln. At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy” repeated everywhere, from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured children who don’t know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily ever after” is made up of three separate words

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