From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jim Choate To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Cc: , In-Reply-To: <40183206.5040805@acm.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Subject: [9fans] Re: Proposed Aid for the nearly blind Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 18:41:33 -0600 Topicbox-Message-UUID: c38d5e76-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 Hi, I invite any and all to participate in the BHC SIG, even if they don't want to 'join' H18 (whatever that might mean). We are finishing up an article now that we hope to have published in the next 3-4 months. It is focused on what we call 'Blind Robotics'. I also just got off the phone with the folks at COMMON who are putting on a conference in San Antonio (I'm in Austin) in several months. One of the things we're hoping to do (and it looks like a 'Go' at this time) is a talk on BHC and Open Sources to the folks at IBM. COMMON is an IBM user group and they're going to talk about Linux and other Open Source solutions. I am willing to provide development resources to any project based around Open Source, not just Linux or Plan 9, which is focused on this sort of thing. What I would ask is that you join the hangar18-general and the bhc-main lists so that you can help build the community. On Wed, 28 Jan 2004, Donald Brownlee wrote: > 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 > > > -- -- Open Forge, LLC 24/365 Onsite Support for PCs, Networks, & Game Consoles 512-695-4126 (Austin, Tx.) help@open-forge.com irc.open-forge.com Hangar 18 Open Source Distributed Computing Using Plan 9 & Linux 512-451-7087 http://open-forge.org/hangar18 irc.open-forge.org James Choate 512-451-7087 ravage@ssz.com jchoate@open-forge.com