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

[Jack Johnson <fragment@nas.com>]

I've always thought it would be rewarding to write software for the
blind.

Part of it is the challenge.  Talk about a shift in thinking for user
interface (what the hell do you do with a mouse?).  The other is
pondering what would actually be useful, and how I might (or might not)
adapt if it were ever to happen to me.

Knock on wood.

-Jack

On Jan 29, 2004, at 2:45 AM, Douglas A. Gwyn wrote:

> Donald Brownlee wrote:
>> They use software that converts text to speech.
>
> At Geotronics we had a blind programmer and tried out
> many of the available aids, including text-to-speech.
> It wasn't very useful when applied to C source text!
> There is also a fingertip pin array that tracks a
> scanner, allowing the operator to "feel" contrasty
> shapes.  That was useful for examining plots but not
> very good for text.
> 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.