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Technology

Mouse Lets Blind "see" Graphics 77

Posted by Hemos from the your-web-page-feels-nice dept.
mblase writes "CNN.com reports on an Israeli company that has developed a "mouse" for the blind that enables them to "see" web graphics. The VirTouch Mouse (VTM) has three fingertip-sized arrays of 32 pins each that rise and fall depending on how white, black, or grey a particular part of the screen is. According to reactions posted on the company Web site, 25 out of 26 users reported "good" or "very good" success with the device. This could be the first step in making the Web truly accessible to the blind; now if only we could eliminate all-Flash sites as well."
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Mouse Lets Blind "see" Graphics More

Mouse Lets Blind "see" Graphics

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  • Don't mod me down so fast! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have something important to say, and that is: Daddy would you like some sausage? Daddy would you like some sausage? [mcdev.com]
  • Get my point son? You usually have something to say but today, nope. You should have stuck with the anonymous Timothy bashing, it's much funnier.

  • weak (Score:1)

    by LoCoPuff ( 1019 )
    Yes, yes you are. You are a very weak troll. I've been watching you lately. You have been failing miserably to impress anyone.
  • What you've really impressed me with is your innovative approach to karma. Oh, also how you are a biter. What happened, the 'real' trolls wouldn't let you on their mailing list, so you run around pretending to be a troll?
  • I didn't know who you 'really' were. My bad momo, didn't mean to piss in your punch.
  • The phreak who told John Draper
    (i.e. Captain Crunch) that one
    can whistle the 2600 tone was
    blind. No, really.
  • I was going to post a link to Logitech's iFeel mouse, but apparently, Logitech's site is down yet again because of CF. You know where to go... [google.com]

    --

  • It's happened to me, too. [shrug] Shucky darn.

    From the Slashdot FAQ: A lot of times, we don't use a particular story on a particular day, but at some later point, someone else submits it, and it ends up getting used. We have 4 to 6 guys working together to post things on Slashdot. What one of us finds stupid, the others might find interesting. Or it just might be the rest of the stuff that's going on that day. There are a variety of factors: the personality of the post, the quality of the submission, or even the quantity of stories already posted when your submission entered the queue.

    Me, I'm rather glad that the submission reviewers aren't one big hive-mind.

  • Well god damn it, it traumatized me! I think the blind ought to be traumatized too!
  • Braille terminals have been around for quite some time, as have screen "readers" that use speech synthesis. The easiest (and best) way to make pages accessible to the blind is to make them easily navigable with lynx.
  • I find it odd that the Israeli's are developing this, due to their history with blind Arab hackers.

    No. Really.

    Israeli prosecutors say Munther and Muzhir Badir, two young and mischievous

    Israeli Arab brothers, managed to tap into an Israeli Defense Force
    radio-station switchboard last year and make international phone calls.
    Piercing such sensitive networks would seem to be an achievement for two
    members of Israel's marginalized Arab community - especially since the
    brothers, who aren't college-educated, have been blind since birth. Even
    prosecutor Doron Porat calls Munther Badir, the alleged "cybercrime"
    ringleader who prosecutors say had other accomplices, a "genius ... who has
    clearly overcome this disability."
    http://www.infowar.com/hacker/99/hack_102199b_j. sh tml
  • I can't even think of how well the porn industry is going to exploit this new technology. I'm not blind, but I certainly plan on being able to feel that nipple with the new mouse. Woo hoo!
  • I agree with what you say, but I have one counter-example: speed. I know people who can read braille much faster than I can read text (and I'm a pretty fast reader). It makes it that much more efficient for the blind. I could also rant about text-to-speech synthesis and processor utilization, but that's irrelevant.

    Also, with text-to-braille one can control the speed at which they read, if they skip text, etc. Fast braille is very different than listening to a chipmunk.

    In other words, I think both approaches have their uses.

    ---

  • Interesting Notion (Score:3)

    by AntiFreeze ( 31247 ) <antifreeze42.gmail@com> on Monday April 16, 2001 @09:31AM (#288416) Homepage Journal
    I'm wonderring about this in a slightly different fashion. "Feeling" graphics aside, I wonder how this could be used to help the blind read web pages. Couldn't this technology be used just as easily to scan the ascii character at the cursor and render it in brail, litterally at the person's fingertips?

    I can see many uses for this technology. If nothing else, it would make things like USENET directly accessable to the blind.

    Now, of course, I have a vested interest in this, because my grandfather was both blind and brilliant, and would have substantially benefitted from technology like this.

    Of couse, there are a bunch of technical problems with turning a web page into brail, like, how does one find the start of the text? How can one be expected to drag the mouse in a straight line over the text so as to not scramble the contents of what they're reading? But I think these questions can be solved. I truly think this holds vast potential, so congrats to the company behind this!

    ---
  • This is a lot like Braille, and yet very few Braille printers are being made these days. And Braille use is on the decline [go.com]. Everyone who is blind knows that voice synthesizers are on the rise. With e-books becoming more popular, no one will be able to afford the battery power to drive solenoids for braille, or worse these image drawing pins. e-books feed the voice synthesizer module for the blind and they can have equal access to texts. Everyone fill out your ALT tags properly please!
  • Wow, My pal, Adam Bailey, built one of these in 1992. He was inspired by his blind lab partner in a class at the University of Buffalo. He made it, with alot of advice from others, and it had a matrix of vibrating pins, like contemporary optical readers, and ran a TSR program which downloaded the bitmap of the area around the mouse pointer to the mouse. It worked with DOS and Windows 3.1.

    He submitted it as a project for a class. Other people submitted lots of stupid stuff that didn't work, and he submitted a working image-feel mouse with software! What do you suppose the Prof did? He got really upset because Adam had not designed packaging for it, when that was not part of the assignment!!!! (I suspect the prof had other plans...)

    He now makes Tube amps in Austin, TX. I emailed him to give him shit about this. I'm sure he's long since abandoned any idea of developing this sort of thing, but it should go as a lesson to all of you inventor types, just because there are millions of people in the world and you're broke does not mean that your idea is not worthwhile. Jobs and Woz had to wake up the pope to wake themselves up.... This one ought to work for Adam... It sure works for me!!!

    =Rich

    _____________________________________
    Richard Mortimer Humphrey
    Technology consultant to fine artists
    rich@cellspace.org

  • Hmmm, how about a braille font? (Score:3)

    by Illserve ( 56215 ) on Monday April 16, 2001 @09:34AM (#288419)
    I wonder if you force your browser to display all characters in braille(sp?) if this device would have sufficient resolution to allow one to read a web page?

    It still might be cumbersome for reading a long file, but for navigating pages with sidebars, such as slashdot, it could work fairly well.

    Other adaptations to browsers could include special color enhancement for the borders of buttons and menus that caused them to be easily identifiable by feel.

    I'm evisioning a pre-installed blind-mode for web browsers that one could activate with standards across platforms.

    Such modifications could also be applied to desktop themes for windows Mac or Unix systems.
  • Couldn't this technology be used just as easily to scan the ascii character at the cursor and render it in brail, litterally at the person's fingertips?

    Yes it could. Great idea. (I moderated you up with an "insightful" but made a comment elsewhere later and slashdot undid it. Sorry 'bout that.)

    With the browser "hotwired" for the touchy-mouse the text would be directly available to the braile converter. Braile would be more readable using the mouse+pin-pad than images of text, and the motion would approximate that of normal braile reading so it would be very easy to learn.

  • Re:We can do better than this (Score:3)

    by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Monday April 16, 2001 @10:56AM (#288421) Journal
    For example, have the affected person wear a video camera on their head [helmet cam?]. The blind person could carry a higher resolution "pad" with maybe 640x480 pins representing the image from the camera. People could use their hands to "see" whatever the camera is pointing at. I might suggest a hands free device, such as one which can be strapped to a person's back, but I don't think there are proper nerves there to sense a high-resolution image.

    In fact exactly this was tried in a lab, and worked like a charm. There are adequate nerves in the back - you just have to move the pins farther apart. (Although the resolution may be low enough that you can only do a very narrow image... The test setup only used a small number of vibrating pins. This was quite some time ago, when the equipment was big, custom, and expensive.)

    An experimental accident gave an interesting insight into the rewiring abilities of the brain. The camera was on a tripod, and during one of the experiments it tipped over and fell into what it was viewing. The experimental subject, blind from birth, reflexively put his hands in front of his eyes.

    That's a very strong indication that the signals from the back had been re-routed into the pathways normally used to process images, implying all that specialized neruoprocessing will be available for even the blind-from-birth to use on images converted to touch. Imagine blind baseball players, or blind drivers as safe as the run-of-the-mill driver.

    Afterward the subject commented that for the first time in his life he had a referrent for the word "looming".

  • if only we could eliminate all-Flash sites as well.

    From most of the flash sites I encounter, being blind would give you an aesthetic advantage.
  • Nothing new, but it's always sad when some poor guy's [dack.com] website gets a casual mention on Slashdot's front page. Not 5 minutes and the site was hosed.

    Read the cached version here [google.com].
  • On the other hand, (no pun intended) it's yet another friggin' standard we have to code web pages for. We already have Netscape vs. Microsoft, Computer vs. PDA/Portable, and options like XML and Javascript. Now we have something else? Arrgh!

    This will make life easier for web developers (or at least for web developers who won't want to bother writing good, structural HTML). To make a site work well with screen-reading software, you have to do things like adding ALT tags for images, labeling column headers in tables, and avoiding using color as the only thing distinguishing two items on the page. This new software works directly from the screen representation of your page, so as long as your page is usable on a non-color monitor [squarefree.com], it should work for people using this new mouse in lightness-darkness mode.

    I wouldn't throw out the ALT tags and the structural syntax quite yet, though. Many of the same things you might have done to make your site readable through text-to-speech software also makes the site more readable through PDA browsers, text browsers (lynx/links), text-to-braille software, and graphical browsers where the user has disabled stylesheets. For example, PDA browsers may support scrolling the body of a table while leaving the headers visible in order to make it easier to read a table on a small screen. If you neglect to tell the browser that the first row of cells are actually headers, that feature might not work. ALT tags for images are good for giving search engines a chance to figure out image-heavy pages.
  • Seriously, I kid you not, just last Wednesday in a computer class we were talking about possible computer interfaces for blind people and I mentioned the idea of using a big array of pins. I got the idea, of course, from those little toys with all the pins where you push the pins with your hand, then lay it on its side so that the impression of your hand is left in the pins.
  • Note my submission of this article was rejected 5 hours prior...
    2001-04-16 11:08:30 Computer graphics and the blind (articles,hardware) (rejected)

    Note that BOBBY [cast.org] is "a free service provided by CAST to help Web page authors identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

    Pretty handy, and sponsored by many of the big Internet companies. Hey mods, can I have some Karma back please???
  • I agree that sometimes, flash sucks. But it doesn't have to. Flash integration on a site, like anything on the web, can look good if done right. Too bad the dack.com site is already slashdotted, or I'd stop by to see if it's a joke, an ugly page, or something in between. Any mirrors?

    The Good Reverend
    I'm different, just like everybody else. [michris.com]
  • While this is good for the blind, it still isn't enough. Until every image is sufficiently tagged (Requiring an average of a few seconds work per image.) the blind will still have a rough time surfing the web. It is a shame that so many companies cut the blind out like this.
  • As I read this I was imagining a blind person checking out most of the flashy, trashy, ad oriented website graphics out there.

    I suspect after a short time they'd long for the days when all they could get was the text.

    But then I'm not blind, so maybe I just don't know.

    Jon Sullivan

  • Yup, they ARE using it for porn... (Score:3)

    by isaac_akira ( 88220 ) on Monday April 16, 2001 @02:46PM (#288430)
    Check out the page with the test graphics on it:

    http://virtouch.com/tests.htm [virtouch.com]

    The last one is obviously a naked chick and something from alt.sex.furries (if you don't know, you probobly don't want to).
  • You'd need a bigger mouse, something that would accomodate your whole hand and perhaps part of your forearm, in this case.
  • now if only we could eliminate all-Flash sites as well."

    Well, if we want to eliminate all flash sites, we'll just link to em on slashdot, and have nature take it's course. From where I stand, Dack.com is not available.

    Because we all now that was unintentional, right Hemos?

  • You'll go blind if you keep that up.
  • should we implement things into HTML such as a nipple tag? uh-oh...
  • Well, since it works on color depths, then mayhaps it wouldn't need alt tags, per se, but what about a blue and a red that are equally bright? To us, who can see, they are dramatically different, but to the blind using this, they are the same. Now, if they are different links, or a picture of red on blue, the difference cannot be seen (felt), and that could ruin the appeal of this design. Any way, this is a step in the right direction, as it is A) better than nothing, and B) happily used by nearly all those in the group who tried it.
  • I have the Logitech iFeel MouseMan [logitech.com] and this product allows you to "feel" a web page as well. While the iFeel technology is limited to a variable speed "rumble" type force feedback, I have found it to be immensely useful to find links and buttons on pages. For instance, while I am reading the summary of a Slashdot article, I can position the cursor on the link to the comments by "feeling" the link (links and buttons have certain feels to them) and then clicking it as I finish the summary. Not that this would help the blind mich, but I, for one, like the certain feel that my desktop and applications have taken on.
    The key is overcoming the "gimmick factor." If they can make it genuinely enhance your interface, it will be successful. Thinkgeek has some info [thinkgeek.com] on the iFeel Mouseman's sister, just the cheaper version.
  • The link in the story:
    http://www.dack.com/web/flashVhtml/
    Claim ed that the HTML version of tiffany.com is more usable than the Flash version.

    Neither worked for me due to a javascript URL. On principle, I will not make an effort to make javascript urls work - they are the most redundant idea ever invented (must patent it actually)

    Does anyone, anywhere, have any use for javascript other than form validation?

    PS: I can see how in theory, stuff like javascript and Flash should be better but I haven't seen any example.
    Also, is the web the right place for "interactivity". I'll take X11 (and alternatives) any day.

    However, I'm partial to the odd Java applet (on some maths/science sites for example where it has demonstrable uses)

    -----

  • I'm not blind, but I certainly plan on being able to feel that nipple with the new mouse.
    Why do you think I use a laptop? Oh, baby! [ibm.com]

    --

  • Very interesting. Where'd you get that information? I'd love to read more...
  • "On the other hand, (no pun intended) it's yet another friggin' standard we have to code web pages for. We already have Netscape vs. Microsoft, Computer vs. PDA/Portable, and options like XML and Javascript. Now we have something else? Arrgh!" But the current standards, which slashdot flamed the web standards project [webstandards.org] for trying to push. Is better for blind, dissabled people, or other browsers like lynx, and palm/wap browsers.

    The standards are already here to do it.
    All it require is people like you to get off your ass and learn/use them. And places like slashdot to support these kinda things... Instead of shunning them.
    Yes, maybe the browser re-direction was a little harsh. But if anyone accutaly bother to read the artical. They would have knowen that there where other ways the were suggested that were way more suttle.

    So, really, there are no new standards for all these things. The standards are already there, and have been there for quite sometime. So don't try and shift the blame. It's there, you just too lazy to do anything about it. And so do the slack browser companies, although, the do seem to be getting the message.

    "It would be better if websites could be more focused, so that bandwith use by individual pages could be more limited, or at least so that coding could be more focused. "

    CSS2, XML/XHTML, look for them on www.w3c.org [w3c.org]

  • The fact is, no matter how gooder designer, or GUI expert you are.. flash is still lacking things.

    1. No way to bookmark a page
    2. No basic things like right click (no more right click, open link in new window, which I use alot).
    3. No way to adjust the fonts if really needed (visuasly impared). At least with browsers, you can override the site's fonts. And if you can't. The w3c.org encorage browser makes to do this.
    4. No basic things like document loading feedback that usaly happens on the status bar of the browser.
    5. Flash 5 still has no way to turn off sound (Grrr!).
    6. It just isn't as flexible as plan old HTML/CSS2/JScript. Good luck building and maintaining a server driven site like slashdot with it.

    The fact is. Flash only seem apropriot as an optional entertainment feature, and for web-designers sites.

    Although.. I have seen a couple of real uses for it, like a scientifict diagram, the was animated. Wish there where more people who would use it for stuff like that, to be usefull, not just to look neat.
    As a web-designer, I still like neat looking flash sites, you can do some real nice stuff with flash. But in general, I think It's overused. Alot of sites would be better off without it.


  • 10. Maybe now people will get rid of that background graphic on their website...
    9. Maybe they won't...
    8. Theming Theming Theming
    7. Good way to get back at your BOFH population... Make the control panel feel funny to touch.
    6. Good way to figure out who the pervs in the office are... Make the control panel feel funny to touch. (And get someone else to fix their computer from now on, ICK!)
    5. All Your Base Are Belong To Us.
    4. Can you imagine a beowulf cluster hooked up to one of these?
    3. Netsex almost enjoyable, news at 11.
    2. Porn... Zit covered highschoolers never had it so good.
    1. Natalie Portman. Nuff Said.

  • Something along these lines has already been tried. It was called the Opticon, I think, and it's most famous for being used by the blind computer guy in Sneakers. However, in real life the devices were a failure because the engineers who designed them didn't know anything about somatosensory neurophysiology. People have several different "touch" receptors in their fingertips that send information up to the brain through different axons (the individual fibers of a nerve). Each of these different types of receptors responds to mechanical stimuli at different frequencies, and the ones the brain uses to read Braille are primarily Merkel disks, which are sensitive to a different frequency range than the device operates at. Apparently because of the design of the device, which uses piezo crystals, you can't tune the frequency very well. I heard they were working on an improved version using shape memory alloys, but I don't know how far that got.
  • The web was accessible by the blind, it's becoming less so. Think about it. Take a nice simple site, something that Lynx can easily make sense of. All you need to understand it blind is a bit of text-to-speech software. This exists. But now we get hideous sites using tables, frames, and non-critical graphics, and the result becomes a mess. Being able to feel a tiny portion of the screen is helpful, but far from ideal. I'd much rather have sites that seperate the content from the formatting, making it possible to have text-to-speech give blind people the information that matters. Graphics are nice, but most information is text. (Incidentally, for those who don't realise it, CSS can be used to give sites that look nice but are still readable.)
  • Like most people here, I hate the really heavy sites, those that use endless graphics, multiple columns, those f***ing annoying Flash animation ads, etc, aian.

    Consider that no small number of 'web designers' use The Evil Empire as their base of operations, and probably use Back Door, err.. Front Page as their page creation engine. (Personally, I prefer emacs or vim. Oh, yeah.)

    Most of the graphics don't have alt tags because these people making eye-candy sites expect the persons at the receiving end to be able to see the damned thing.

    I agree that the basic technological premise is good, however, how do they determine 'color depth'? What makes #00558F more or less than #55008F? Do they CMYK or HSV the images? (If so, I know a certain GPL software project [gimp.org] that could use such code. :)


    Windows.. Good for targeting rocks.
  • now this will sure add a new dimension to browsing porn sites...

  • People who can see, shouldn't design this crap . . .

    Can you spot the invention that the 20/20 retard made.

    • A full sized braille terminal that translates an ASCII character console into "pop-up" braille text.
    • A seat cover that can display b&w images by pressing an array of thousands of pins into your back at various depths.
    • The screen reader
    • Keyboard shortcuts for the GUI
    • Though the blind don't seem to use mice yet, a mouse with very limited texture feedback.
  • /*begin sarcasm*/

    Now even the blind can be subjected to your god-awful color schemes in the Apache and BSD sections.

    /*end sarcasm*/

  • As usual im writing this from my sofa using an old laptop as a dumb terminal connected to the computer in another room. Textmode really rocks! Now, if there only were VT102 terminals with Braille output...

    Well okay http://www.playboy.com doesnt rock in textmode... In that case this device is interresting.
  • One of the reactions on the site is "I have always envied my little boy because he plays computer games with such ease. Now these games are available to me also."

    I would love to see someone play a game of Quake with this mouse. Get fragged and have the pins spike through your fingers.
    ----

  • ... just thought I'd add my 2 cents.

  • Good for blind, bad for web. (Score:3)

    by daemonenwind ( 178848 ) on Monday April 16, 2001 @09:05AM (#288452)
    I like the idea that computers are being made more usuable for everyone. It's a shame that the main interface to a computer has to be a visually-oriented mechanisim, since so many of us either have problems with vision or are developing them from using computers.

    On the other hand, (no pun intended) it's yet another friggin' standard we have to code web pages for. We already have Netscape vs. Microsoft, Computer vs. PDA/Portable, and options like XML and Javascript. Now we have something else? Arrgh!

    It would be better if websites could be more focused, so that bandwith use by individual pages could be more limited, or at least so that coding could be more focused.

    Still, who wouldn't want to feel your opponent in UT get fragged? That could be pretty cool!

  • no my mouse turns text under the cursor info brail and produces a reliefe of any gfx's / window borders depending on the configuration. so it's not quite the same.
  • Well, without reading the specifics of the technology (I know, I hate it when people make uninformed posts, too, but... everyone is entitled to at least one ;), I get the impression that this would be used on sites who are really concerned about accessibility. What it won't do is automagically make a site accessible to the blind. It'll just make accessible sites even more so. In this way, this is just a complementary tool to ALT tags. So, it doesn't solve any problems, in terms of making already unaccessible sites accessible. But it provides yet another tool for those site authors who are concerned about such things.
  • As a person who can see, I'm curious about this de vice. To my mind it looks completely inadequate... three little finger pad sized deals. I guess it's supposed to be an input-output device, but how about a similar device that is output only? That would be cool, imho-- especially if it were larger, like the size of a paperback book even.

    Also, gotta love a technical company company that can't add. In the survey they have 15 "very goods" to 9 "goods" to get 24, but they say they got 25 good results.
  • Finger? Poor blind bastard could lose an arm in there. This technology MUST be combined with one of those in-the-works aroma-over-tcp/ip devices, in order to prevent this sort of awful hypothetical tragedy.
  • I question how good their testimonials are.
    This guy thinks there is a penalty box in football.
    From VTM:
    "I have been a football fan for years...understand what the announcer means by ...Penalty Box." [virtouch.com]
  • Yes I do agree with the last thought on flash but only on a temporary basis. Flash is too much too soon. Even with DSL most Flash sites are way bloated.

    As for porn we all seem to agree how great this mouse will be.

    But nobody has thought of video gaming. Imagine playing classic games like Safecracker and feeling the wheel spin. Or Zork. When the light goes out we can feel our way around until we get eaten by the Grue.

  • here's another interesting device [wisc.edu] to help the blind "see".
    --
  • With 29 minute render time, it must take days to jerk off...
  • According to reactions posted on the company Web site, 25 out of 26 users reported "good" or "very good" success with the device....
    The site failed to mention that 25 users went to p0rn sites, whereas the other two got lost somewhere @ judgejudy.com



    I am so smart. S-M-R-T ... I mean S-M-A-R-T.
  • "now if only we could eliminate all-Flash sites as well."

    A device that changes an array of pins based on what array of black and white is underneath it? The first rapidly animated flash site that goes over is going to end up shredding the user's fingers. With the impending lawsuits, I can see it really being the end of all-Flash sites.

  • That reminds me on the thing they had in X-Men.
    Was pretty cool...
  • This is like looking at television through a paper tube.

    Seems to me the ultimate blind person's access would be an entire screen laying horizontally on a desk surface using this pin technology.


    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    ~~ the real world is much simpler ~~
  • Wasn't there something that was a lot like this in the movie 'Sneakers' that came out 10+ years ago...?

  • I'm wonderring about this in a slightly different fashion. "Feeling" graphics aside, I wonder how this could be used to help the blind read web pages. Couldn't this technology be used just as easily to scan the ascii character at the cursor and render it in brail, litterally at the person's fingertips?

    I guess you could use it for that purpose, but wouldn't text-to-speech be a lot easier and more appropiate? I can't imagine too many situations where it would be easier to read Braille than to just simply have a voice synthesizer.

  • I agree with what you say, but I have one counter-example: speed. I know people who can read braille much faster than I can read text (and I'm a pretty fast reader). It makes it that much more efficient for the blind. I could also rant about text-to-speech synthesis and processor utilization, but that's irrelevant.

    Well, I stand corrected, then. I didn't even know that it was possible to "read" Braille faster than reading text. In that case, this may be a beneficient for text-heavy uses, such as e-books and research papers, RFCs, etc. But I still odn't think it would very useful for the average website.

  • Question? (Score:4)

    by syrupMatt ( 248267 ) on Monday April 16, 2001 @09:00AM (#288468) Homepage Journal
    Okay, while I'm not debating that this is a great thing, I have a few ponderances.

    One, I understand that the field of pins acts as a representational map of an image, and reacts to color depths(?). However, how does this help on a text/image page, where there are muitiple images with different functions?

    Two, as far as the audio component is concerned, what does it draw its instructions from, in regards to web/technology use? ALT tags? The NAME property? Therefore, the technology is only as foolproof as the careless web designer who forgets to fill out alt tags?

    Three, wouldn't image maps drive this thing nutty?

    Such as I said, I think this is a marvelous idea. However, those questions seemed to jump instantly to mind on its ability to be a viable technology to bring graphic-based interfaces to the blind.
  • Boy, if this really works it will be very nice.. but I suspect mostly for those who have been blind from birth and have a heightened sense of touch.

    I guess that if I lost my eyesight I would not expect to be able to use a computer any more than I would expect to be able to fly an airplane or drive a car again. I don't expect that my sense of touch, and the cognitive processes that go with it, would ever develop to the level of a person who has been sightless since birth. I've read that the cognitive processes that handle sensory perception are developed in the first few years of life. After that, they're pretty much "hard-wired."

    As long as we are using keyboards and graphic displays as the physical elements of human-computer interfaces, I believe that there is a point, beyond which, adapting these elements for the blind becomes futile. At that point it's like trying to make a platypus fly.

    The next step, of course, is for all computer systems to use natural language interfaces, a la "Star Trek". That's what I'm waiting for!

  • Flash is a fine thing when used well. Just because there are a lot of shitty Flash sites out there doesn't mean the technology is lame.

    If sucky design were the justification for killing a technology, HTML would be loooong gone...damn, I wish I could use the BLINK tag on /.

  • Devices intended to enable the blind to use Graphical User Interfaces are misguided, IMHO. However, lots of information is text-based, which makes it suitable for use with a reader.

    I have a friend who's blind and he swears by emacspeak, by T. V. Raman.When used with the freely-available ViaVoice text-to-speech SDK from IBM, it is the only free solution available. With it, the blind can send/receive email, browse the web, edit files... pretty much anything.

    Here are the links:
  • "now if only we could eliminate all-Flash sites as well."

    yes because Slashcode looks SOOO good.
    BRRRAAAHHAAHAHAHHAHAH


  • This could traumatize the blind (Score:4)

    by banuaba ( 308937 ) <drbork&hotmail,com> on Monday April 16, 2001 @08:56AM (#288473)
    Can you imagine some blind guy blundering in to goatsex and thinking 'I just shoved my finger in that guy's ass!'

    Noise of gun being put into mouth
    Brant
  • Since people are too damn lazy to have the courtesy of using "alt" tags, this is a great thing for the blind, assuming it works.

    Ryan T. Sammartino

  • Sweet (Score:1)

    by ez76 ( 322080 )
    I'm going to get one of these babies, load up Photoshop, and show my wife the true meaning of gradient fill.
  • now maybe my keyboard can walk on water.

    m.kelley
    www.mkelley.net

  • We can do better than this (Score:3)

    by Decimal Dave ( 411182 ) on Monday April 16, 2001 @09:45AM (#288477)
    This technology is fairly impressive, but I think that it should be extended to serve as a more general solution to blindness. For example, have the affected person wear a video camera on their head [helmet cam?]. The blind person could carry a higher resolution "pad" with maybe 640x480 pins representing the image from the camera. People could use their hands to "see" whatever the camera is pointing at. I might suggest a hands free device, such as one which can be strapped to a person's back, but I don't think there are proper nerves there to sense a high-resolution image.


    "Leave the strategizing to those of use with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
  • Don't worry, I'll get the fiend in metamod.
  • Back in the early 80's, I worked with a blind programmer in San Francisco. He had two devices, a braille terminal that ran on 300 baud ascii that worked miserably with our IBM system (which did not support xon-xoff), and a reader that he could use wither with paper (with a head that had its own light) or with a VTR (using light from the character mode VTRs)

    In those cases, the device simply raised a pin where it saw light (or dark, with the print media) in the shape of the character.

    He was much faster with the braille terminal and we finally got him a tymnet account and communicated with them on X.25 (they supported xon-xoff, and we could choke output using X.25 protocol) and he was able to use the braille terminal effectively.

    I hope this device is effective, it is actually very similar to the screen reader, with the exception that it is has drivers as opposed to a light coupling (which should be more effective, since the user would not have to manipulate a camera. Then again, the user could more easily find his position on the screen with the camera).

    I wonder if it has a good system for screen coordinate feedback?

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