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

[Sherri]

I agree and couldn't quite make the connection myself.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Cindy Handel" <cindy425 at verizon.net>
To: "NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2009 6:30 AM
Subject: Re: [gui-talk] Fw: [vipnews] For the Blind, Technology Does What a 
Guide Dog Can't


> Interesting article, but it has nothing to do with the title.
>
> Cindy
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Sherri" <flmom2006 at gmail.com>
> To: "NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2009 10:30 PM
> Subject: [gui-talk] Fw: [vipnews] For the Blind,Technology Does What a 
> Guide
> Dog Can't
>
>
> I don't think I agree with the title of the article, but it really didn't 
> go
> that direction.
>
> Sherri
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: <editor at vipnews.org.uk>
> To: <vipnews at googlegroups.com>
> 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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