[nabs-l] Recording NABS meeting

[Peter Donahue]

Hello Christopher and listers,

    On the surface this is true, but if you would but experament as we're 
doing here you might be pleasantly surprised by how much digital photography 
and video work we can do nonvisually as I'm now discovering. Several of the 
sites I manage contain pictures taken by blind persons with little to no 
vision. They found alternative techniques to use for "Getting that perfect 
shot" and preparing photos for a Web Site or other presentation. I 
personally know some of them and talked withthemabout their techniques for 
taking pictures.

 I have some vision, but more often than not I fall back onaa mnon-visual 
method for doing tasks such as manipulating photos to prepare for the Web 
and for other presentations. A knowledge of photographic techniques will 
allow you to figure out how to do tasks such as resizing photos and pasting 
them in to text documents such as those created with Microsoft Word and 
Adobe Acrobat. There are some tasks that will require sighted assistance, 
but again a thorough knowledge of photography could help you find 
work-arounds for them. Want to avoid pixcelation in photos. Don't enlarge 
them excessively. No vision required.

    If we can find ways to take pictures and digitally process them for 
display the next logical step would be davveling in to the World of digital 
video. On the surface one is lead to think that there's no way for a blind 
person to shoot video sequences. I think there's one Raymond Kurzweil whose 
all ready working on that problem in relation to the Kurzweil NFB Reader. 
Future versions of the reader will include object recognission and 
eventually the ability to describe the location and movements of people and 
objects in a particular location.  Perhaps this technology will eventually 
find its way in to video cameras to assist sighted videographers as well as 
aspiring blind ones.

    If we would just think out of the box we might figure out ways blind 
people can shoot video until this technology is perfected.

    Just as with preparing still photos there are tasks that would be visual 
in nature in the digital video World. One that comes to mind off-hand is 
being able to sinc audio recordings with video sequences. For example if 
you're filming a documentary that shows a whale breaching you need to be 
sure the viewer hears the splash when the whale hits the water and sees it 
visually. It would be rather amusing if The splash was heard when the whale 
is still under water. But perhaps here too there may be a nonvisual 
solution. Some of us are learning how to sinc text documents with audio when 
creating digital talking books. This is done by placing markers in the audio 
files that correspond with text files of the DAISY document. A similar 
process is used to link audio and visual eents in a video. This now leaves 
us with just the need to visually verrify that the sincing is correct, and 
that the appearance of the video is of a high quality. There's always the 
good old team approach to surmount this obstacle.

 The moral of the story is that if we imagine ways to do what we wish to do 
in life there are ways for a blind person to achieve the seemingly 
unachievable and do the seemingly undoable. Okay you aspiring vlind 
videographers let's develop the techniques so we can show and tell them how 
it's done!

Peter Donahue



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Christopher Wright" <chriswright11 at verizon.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 24, 2009 4:11 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Recording NABS meeting


Video recording requires the use of video equipment which requires sighted
assistance. Audio recording is much easier, in my opinion, especially with
all these digital recorders out there.


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