[Blindtlk] devices RE: introduction

Tue Sep 11 02:28:46 UTC 2012

Harvey Lauer, from the Veteran's Administration Hines Rehabilitation Center 
was involved in studying and promoting the Stereotoner in the early 1970s. 
In an article he wrote for the Monitor, he described an earlier device 
called the Optophone, which may date back to 1913.  The Stereotoner had a 
camera with a single column of photo sensors, each controlling the volume of 
a tone of a particular pitch.  Like the Optacon, you had to hand-track the 
camera across the print in order to read anything.  You can make the vOICe 
program act somewhat like a stereotoner, but tracking a camera across print 
might be difficult to simulate.  After a while it became apparent that the 
Optacon, though more expensive, was also better for most users. I think that 
both devices used some integrated circuits and some discrete transistors, 
since the IC was invented around 1959.

It's hard for young people to imagine this, but around 1971-1973 the only 
exhibits at NFB national conventions, besides literature, were by 
Telesensory Systems, the maker of the Optacon, and the BED-3 braille 
embosser by Triformation Systems, which slowly produced braille on paper 
tape.  The Optacon  was the first electronic aid that captured the attention 
of a lot of blind people.  In the 1950s people began to send their computer 
output to line printers in such a way that they could get a poor-quality 
braille printout.  By 1967, Mike Freeman, while at Reed College, programmed 
its computer so that he could hear its output in Morse Code through an FM 
radio in the computer room.  In 1968, programmers at Lawrence-Livermore 
Laboratories hooked one of their computers to an analog-to-digital converter 
and audio amplifier so the output could be spelled out for Jim Willows.  By 
1971 the Votrax speech synthesizer began to be developed by an engineer in 
Michigan.

In 1975 Master Specialties sold a talking scientific calculator for $2,500. 
In 1976 TSI sold their Speech Plus four-function talking calculator for 
merely $400.  And in 1975, Alan Schlank was sent to Boston to get a 
demonstration of a rumored reading machine being developed by someone named 
Raymond Kurzweil.  So by 1980 a small but growing number of technology 
exhibits were at the NFB conventions.  The rest is history.

-----Original Message----- 
From: Hyde, David W. (ESC)
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2012 8:45 AM
To: 'Lloyd Rasmussen' ; 'Blind Talk Mailing List'
Subject: Re: [Blindtlk] devices RE: introduction

Lloyd, I haven't seen this device, but it reminds me a bit of a short lived 
reading device called a stereotoner. As I remember it, this thing gave each 
printed letter an acoustical pitch, and it is alleged that some people used 
it to read printed material.

-----Original Message-----
From: blindtlk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindtlk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On 
Behalf Of Lloyd Rasmussen
Sent: Saturday, September 08, 2012 10:02 PM
To: Blind Talk Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Blindtlk] devices RE: introduction

the vOICe is not really a device, but it uses devices you may already have.
If you have a webcam connected to your PC, or if you have it look at your 
screen or the active window or the area around the mouse pointer, it 
converts the image into a "soundscape" which is an audio signal, rescanned 
every two seconds, which represents the image.  Probably best used with 
stereo headphones.  In this representation, an imaginary vertical line scans 
across the image from left to right.  At each instant, tones are generated 
with highest pitch being toward the top of the image, and with volume of 
each pitch corresponding to the brightness of the image at that point.  By 
default, 64 different frequencies are generated, and 176 vertical lines 
constitute a two-second scan.  A single vertical line would sound like a 
burst of noise.  A horizontal line sounds like a tone of constant pitch 
which lasts the whole 2 seconds, which pans from left to right in your 
headphones.  A print capital V would sound like a tone which falls and then 
rises in pitch, repeated every two seconds.  You can adjust most of the 
parameters of how the image is sonified, including zooming it, changing the 
scan rate, reversing the video, filtering by one color, etc.

It's a small Windows executable.  People who really get into this obtain a 
webcam that is built into a pair of glasses, put a portable computer in a 
backpack (providing for enough ventilation), run the software with speech 
recognition, and walk around the house or the area learning how to 
distinguish objects, learning about how occlusion and parallax work, etc.

Whereas the Optacon was a direct translation aid (the human has to do all 
the work of interpreting what the camera sees) for printed material, the 
vOICe is probably most useful as a direct translation aid for sensing the 
environment or quick rendering of images that appear on a PC.  Like the 
Optacon, it takes lots and lots of practice to get good at using it, and it 
remains mostly a subject for experimentation rather than a tool that a lot 
of blind people are using in their daily lives.  It would not be a good 
travel aid, in my opinion, because you need to hear environmental sounds and 
the time to recognize a scene is long.  And Peter Meijer, the author, is 
careful not to make any claims that it would be a good substitute for a cane 
or guide dog.  The first version, run in dedicated hardware, is now 20 years 
old.  I think that the Windows executable is about 15 years old (undergoes 
continuous improvements).  An Android  version has been in Google Play for 
about 2 years.  He also did one for Simbian cell phones, but these are 
disappearing from the market.

This is probably more than you wanted to know, but I think it is 
fascinating.  www.seeingwithsound.com .
Lloyd Rasmussen, Wheaton, MD, W3IUU
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Nusbaum
Sent: Saturday, September 08, 2012 10:22 PM
To: 'Blind Talk Mailing List'
Subject: Re: [Blindtlk] devices RE: introduction

Hi Roger,

I've heard of this device, but I don't think it works quite like the 
Optacon. From what I read about it, it seemed like some kind of device that 
simulated the sense of sight by making the blind person feel like he/she is 
seeing the object being detected by the VOICE. I was kind of intrigued by 
this technology, but couldn't quite wrap my head around how it works. I 
would be interested to hear any firsthand accounts of how the technology 
works from anybody who has actually used the device. By the way, I read 
about this device in an article in the Matilda Ziegler magazine a few months 
ago.

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: blindtlk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindtlk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On 
Behalf Of Roger devin Prater
Sent: Saturday, September 08, 2012 9:35 PM
To: Blind Talk Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Blindtlk] devices RE: introduction

Hmm, have any of you tried the vOICe? http://seeingwithsound.com It works, 
as far as I know about the opticon, like it, only it uses sound instead of 
tactiles, and is free. http://seeingwithsound.come just in case I misspelled 
it the first time, LOL.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Freeman" <k7uij at panix.com>
To: "Blind Talk Mailing List" <blindtlk at nfbnet.org>
Cc: "Blind Talk Mailing List" <blindtlk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 08, 2012 8:26 PM
Subject: Re: [Blindtlk] devices RE: introduction

> Absolutely not! Translation into Braille means the unit would be
> telling you what it think it sees, not letting you interpret for
> yourself what the unit sees.
>
> Mike
>