[Electronics-talk] Fw: [vipnews] For the Blind, Technology Does What a Guide Dog Can't

[Sherri]

I don't think I agree with the title of the article, but it really didn't go 
that direction.

Sherri
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From: <editor at vipnews.org.uk>
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Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2009 9:58 PM
Subject: [vipnews] For the Blind, Technology Does What a Guide Dog Can't


>
> January 4, 2009
> For the Blind, Technology Does What a Guide Dog Can't
> By MIGUEL HELFT
> MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.
>
> T. V. RAMAN was a bookish child who developed a love of math and puzzles 
> at an early age.
> That passion didn't change after glaucoma took his eyesight at the age of 
> 14. What changed is the
> role that technology - and his own innovations - played in helping him 
> pursue his interests.
> A native of India, Mr. Raman went from relying on volunteers to read him 
> textbooks at a top
> technical university there to leading a largely autonomous life in Silicon 
> Valley, where he is a
> highly respected computer scientist and an engineer at Google.
> Along the way, Mr. Raman built a series of tools to help him take 
> advantage of objects or
> technologies that were not designed with blind users in mind. They ranged 
> from a Rubik's Cube
> covered in Braille to a software program that can take complex 
> mathematical formulas and read them
> aloud, which became the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation at Cornell. He 
> also built a version of
> Google's search service tailored for blind users.
> Mr. Raman, 43, is now working to modify the latest technological gadget 
> that he says could make life
> easier for blind people: a touch-screen phone.
> "What Raman does is amazing," said Paul Schroeder, vice president for 
> programs and policy at the
> American Foundation for the Blind, which conducts research on technology 
> that can help visually
> impaired people. "He is a leading thinker on accessibility issues, and his 
> capacity to design and
> alter technology to meet his needs is unique."
> Some of Mr. Raman's innovations may help make electronic gadgets and Web 
> services more user-friendly
> for everyone. Instead of asking how something should work if a person 
> cannot see, he says he prefers
> to ask, "How should something work when the user is not looking at the 
> screen?"
> Such systems could prove useful for drivers or anyone else who could 
> benefit from eyes-free access
> to a phone. They could also appeal to aging baby boomers with fading 
> vision who want to keep using
> technology they've come to depend on.
> Mr. Raman's approach reflects a recognition that many innovations designed 
> primarily for people with
> disabilities have benefited the broader public, said Larry Goldberg, who 
> oversees the National
> Center for Accessible Media at WGBH, the public broadcasting station in 
> Boston. They include curb
> cuts for wheelchairs, captions for television broadcasts and optical 
> character-recognition
> technology, which was fine-tuned to create software that could read 
> printed books aloud and is now
> used in many computer applications, he said.
> With no buttons to guide the fingers on its glassy surface, the 
> touch-screen cellphone may seem a
> particularly daunting challenge. But Mr. Raman said that with the right 
> tweaks, touch-screen
> phones - many of which already come equipped with GPS technology and a 
> compass - could help blind
> people navigate the world.
> "How much of a leap of faith does it take for you to realize that your 
> phone could say, 'Walk
> straight and within 200 feet you'll get to the intersection of X and Y,' " 
> Mr. Raman said. "This is
> entirely doable."
> ADVOCATES for the blind have long complained that technology companies 
> have done a generally poor
> job of making their products accessible. The Web, while opening many 
> opportunities for blind people,
> is still riddled with obstacles. And sophisticated screen-reader software, 
> which turns documents and
> Web pages into synthesized speech, can cost more than $1,000. Even with a 
> screen reader, many sites
> are hard to navigate.
> Last year, the National Federation of the Blind reached a settlement of a 
> landmark class-action
> lawsuit against one company whose site advocates found unusable, Target. 
> In the settlement, the
> retailer agreed to make its Web site accessible to blind people. The 
> federation assesses the
> usability of Web sites and currently certifies only a handful as being 
> fully accessible.
> One challenge is that technology often evolves much faster than the 
> guidelines that ensure Web sites
> work well with screen readers. In December, the World Wide Web Consortium, 
> an Internet standards
> group, released Version 2.0 of its accessibility guidelines for Web sites. 
> The previous version
> dated back to 1999, when the Web consisted largely of static Web pages 
> rather than interactive
> applications.
> Obstacles on the Web take many forms. A common one is the Captcha, a 
> security feature consisting of
> a string of distorted letters and numbers that users are supposed to read 
> and retype before they
> register for a new service or send e-mail. Few Web sites offer audio 
> Captchas.
> Some pages are just poorly designed, like e-commerce sites where the 
> "checkout" button is an image
> that isn't labeled so screen readers can find it.
> "The overwhelming percentage of the industry really hasn't stepped up to 
> the plate to provide the
> blindness community with equal access to their products," said Eric 
> Bridges, director of advocacy
> and governmental affairs at the American Council of the Blind. Mr. Bridges 
> and other advocates argue
> that accessibility should be built into new technologies, not added as an 
> afterthought.
> People with other disabilities face similar challenges on the Internet. 
> "On the deafness side, the
> frustration is huge because of all of the video out there without 
> captions," Mr. Goldberg said.
> MR. RAMAN, who before joining Google in 2005 worked at Adobe Systems and 
> as a researcher at I.B.M.,
> is intimately familiar with accessibility problems, both personally and 
> professionally. In 2006, he
> developed a version of Google's search engine that gives a slight 
> preference to Web sites that work
> well with screen readers. The system had to test millions of Web pages.
> "You wouldn't have found a single page that fully complied with the 
> accessibility guidelines," Mr.
> Raman said. Still, the system could detect which pages worked reasonably 
> well with screen readers.
> The service is not being used as widely as he had hoped. Still, it has had 
> an impact. Several Web
> site operators whose sites weren't showing up prominently in Google search 
> results asked Mr. Raman
> how they could fix their sites so they would rank better.
> The service includes a screen magnifier that enlarges individual search 
> results. Mr. Raman says the
> feature is intended to help low-vision users, but it could also prove 
> useful to a much larger
> population, especially on cellphones and other devices with small screens.
> For his own use, he has built a highly customized system that allows him 
> efficient access to much of
> what he needs on his PC and on the Web, stripping out anything that could 
> slow him down. For
> instance, the system goes directly to the article text on the news sites 
> he reads regularly,
> bypassing navigational links and other features found on most Web pages.
> On a recent day, Mr. Raman was working on a research paper about the 
> future structure of the Web. A
> monitor hung above the desk. It is usually turned off, unless he wants to 
> show a colleague or
> visitor what he is working on. He typed at his keyboard, his head slightly 
> tilted to one side,
> listening to his screen reader through a pair of wireless headphones.
> The screen reader is calibrated to speak at roughly triple the speed of a 
> normal voice. To the
> untrained ear, the output is incomprehensible, but it allows Mr. Raman to 
> "read" at roughly the same
> speed as a sighted person.
> Processing information quickly is a skill he has developed over the years: 
> a video on YouTube shows
> him solving his Braille Rubik's Cube in 23 seconds. When he is not typing, 
> Mr. Raman, who wears
> large sunglasses, is often folding and unfolding pieces of paper into 
> tiny, origami-like geometrical
> shapes at prodigious speed.
> He shares a work area at Google with Charles Chen, a 25-year-old engineer, 
> and Hubbell, Mr. Raman's
> guide dog. (Hubbell has his own Web site.)
> Mr. Chen, who is sighted, developed a free screen reader for Web pages 
> that works with the Firefox
> browser. Working together, the two recently added keyboard shortcuts that 
> help blind and low-vision
> users navigate quickly through Google's search results. They've also 
> developed tools to make
> sophisticated Web applications, like e-mail and blog readers, suitable for 
> screen-reading software.
> Now, much of their effort is focused on touch-screen phones.
> "The thing I am most interested in is all of the stuff moving to the 
> mobile world, because it is a
> big life-changer," Mr. Raman said.
> To show their progress, Mr. Raman pulled his T-Mobile G1, a touch-screen 
> phone with Google's Android
> software, from a pocket of his jeans. He and Mr. Chen have already 
> outfitted it with software that
> speaks much like a screen reader on a PC. Now they are working on ways to 
> allow blind people, or
> anyone who is not looking at the screen, to enter text, numbers and 
> commands.
> That development would complement voice-recognition systems, which are not 
> always reliable and don't
> work well in noisy environments.
> Since he cannot precisely hit a button on a touch screen, Mr. Raman 
> created a dialer that works
> based on relative positions. It interprets any place where he first 
> touches the screen as a 5, the
> center of a regular telephone dial pad. To dial any other number, he 
> simply slides his finger in its
> direction - up and to the left for 1, down and to the right for 9, and so 
> on. If he makes a mistake,
> he can erase a digit simply by shaking the phone, which can detect motion.
> He and Mr. Chen are testing several other input methods. None of these 
> technologies have been rolled
> out, but Mr. Raman, who is already using the G1 as his primary cellphone, 
> hopes to make them freely
> available soon.
> (Few screen readers are available for smartphones today, and they can 
> often cost as much as a phone
> itself.)
> What may become the most life-changing mobile technology - a phone that 
> can recognize and read signs
> through its camera - may still be a few years away, Mr. Raman said. 
> Already, some devices can read
> text this way. But because blind users don't know where signs are, they 
> can't point the camera at
> them or align it properly, Mr. Raman said. Once chips become powerful 
> enough, they will be able to
> detect a sign's location and read skewed type, he said.
> "Those things will happen," he said. When they do, sighted users will 
> benefit, too.
> "If you have the technology that can recognize a street sign as you drive 
> by it, that is helpful for
> everyone," he said. "In a foreign country, it will translate it."
> Mr. Raman's innovations have already made their way onto millions of PCs. 
> At Adobe in the 1990s, he
> helped to adapt the PDF format so it could be read by screen readers. That 
> was required for PDF to
> be used by the federal government, and it eventually led to the 
> technology's being embraced as a
> global standard for electronic documents.
> "It was incredibly important to us as a business, and to the blind," said 
> John Warnock, the chairman
> and founder of Adobe.
> Mr. Raman says he thinks he has the largest impact when he can persuade 
> other engineers to make
> their products accessible - or, better yet, when he can convince them that 
> there are interesting
> problems to be solved in this area. "If I can get another 10 engineers 
> motivated to work on
> accessibility," he said, "it is a huge win."
>
> SOURCE (Printable)
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/business/04blind.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
>
>
>
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