From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Martin C.Atkins To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Proposed Aid for the nearly blind Message-Id: <20040129183559.07dbfb9e.martin@parvat.com> In-Reply-To: References: <40183206.5040805@acm.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 18:35:59 +0530 Topicbox-Message-UUID: c4bf3b48-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 On Thu, 29 Jan 2004 10:45:45 GMT "Douglas A. Gwyn" wrote: > The best text aid we found was a VersaBraille > terminal, which had a ticker-tape-like scrolling > Braille display and chording Braille keyboard. It > was very handy that the Unix terminal driver had > decent support for monocase devices (think Teletype > model 33), flagging uppercase output with \ prefix. I've also helped a student who used a VersaBraille. It was very good, and I thought rather more successful than speech synthesis, since it allows some degree of 'random access' to the 'screen'. It could also be used independently of the computer, as a sort of dictation machine - great, except that the tapes it used for storage were not that wonderful. The main disadvantages were that the braille display was very small, and it was horrendously expensive! Martin -- Martin C. Atkins martin@parvat.com Parvat Infotech Private Limited http://www.parvat.com{/,/martin}