Re: [9fans] Proposed Aid for the nearly blind

[Donald Brownlee <brownlee@acm.org>]

Saw part of a program (KCET?) last night about
Marriot Hotels' reservation center employing
many visually impaired people. They use
software that converts text to speech.
This method permits completely blind
people to work.

west9@worldnet.att.net wrote:
> As an aide to the nearly blind, I would like to design and build a Plan9 or Inferno based system that presents text one word at a time in the center of the screen in a font perhaps 25mm high. The progress of the text would be controlled by keyboard entries in the style of vi.
>
> I am motivated to try this by having observed an elderly physician with macular degeneration use a commercial pc application that presented enlarged text as a crawler under mouse control. He was very challenged, and it seemed to me that the computer should be doing more work.
>
> The scheme of presenting text one word at a time comes, I think, from research into computeraided speed reading at Bell Labs in the 1960's, at least that's where I remember seeing it. It was found that reading was fastest if the sequentially presented words were sized to occupy a fixed area in the center of the screen
>
> If someone could sketch out the software development that would be required to test out this idea, I'd be much obliged.
>
> -Tom
>