From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: , <40183206.5040805@acm.org> Subject: Re: [9fans] Proposed Aid for the nearly blind Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 10:45:45 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: c49c54f2-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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.