From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v609) In-Reply-To: References: , <40183206.5040805@acm.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Message-Id: Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Jack Johnson Subject: Re: [9fans] Proposed Aid for the nearly blind To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 21:18:17 -0800 Topicbox-Message-UUID: c7451108-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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.