[nabs-l] Recording NABS meeting
Peter Donahue
pdonahue1 at sbcglobal.net
Mon May 25 05:38:06 UTC 2009
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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