[Nfb-announce] NYTimes: Interesting technology article

[Corbb O'Connor]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/business/04blind.html?pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper


The New York Times

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.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company