[nfbwatlk] U.W. Professor's work erases technological barriers, Seattle P-I, December 3, 2008

[Nightingale, Noel]

Published in today's Seattle P-I, link and text follow.
Link:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/390358_cybersigning03.html

Photo:  Sangyun Hahn, who is a blind doctoral candidate and an inspiration to UW professor Richard Ladner, looks at a Braille Tactile Graphic of a precalculus fourth-degree equation.

Text:
Professor's work erases technological barriers
Projects to help deaf, blind benefit everyone
By TOM PAULSON
P-I REPORTER

For Richard Ladner, it isn't so much about helping people who are blind or deaf get better use of technology as it is about working with people who have disabilities to help us all get better use out of technology.

"Few people seem to be aware that a lot of mainstream technologies started out as access technologies," the University of Washington computer scientist said.

The modem was first intended as a telecommunications device for the deaf, Ladner noted, and optical character recognition technology -- think scanners, digital-image processing -- gained traction in the mid-1970s as a means toward creating a "reading machine" for the blind. Musician Stevie Wonder even bought one of those first machines.

To return the favor, Ladner lately has been using his talents as a top theoretical computer scientist to help launch myriad projects aimed at using computers, Web-based applications, cell phones and other mainstream information technologies to make life easier for those without hearing or sight.

There's MobileASL (American Sign Language), a project he's doing in collaboration with UW electrical engineering professor Eve Riskin. It uses new video-compression techniques that allow deaf cell phone users to simultaneously see each other over the phone and chat by signing.

"It's very exciting to see how rapidly it's progressed," said Riskin, an expert on data compression (and an associate dean at the UW). "We never dreamed that we'd be able to get it working on a cell phone within three years."

The MobileASL project is the first time anyone's ever been able to do real-time, two-way video communication over regular cell phone networks in the U.S. (which have relatively low data transmission rates compared with the faster networks found in Europe and Asia). The UW team recently won a grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct a field test in Seattle sometime next year.

Then there's WebAnywhere, a new kind of "screen reader" program that allows the blind to surf the Web from any computer with help from a Stephen Hawking-like computerized voice that reads the text, describes links and generally serves as a surfing guide (Memo to innovators: Maybe make that voice a little less geeky).

Screen readers, voice-over software programs for vocalizing what's on the computer screen, are not new. But most of them have to be loaded on to the computer, and that must be repeated if a blind person wants to use a computer that isn't his own, such as at a library.

WebAnywhere is a Web-based application that is free, open-source and fast-loading from any computer using any kind of operating system. (To try it and learn more, go to http://webanywhere.cs.washington.edu/) "Richard knows how to combine these cool research problems with finding solutions that have social impact," said Jeff Bigham, a UW doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering who, with Ladner's guidance, developed WebAnywhere.

Bigham said one of the remaining problems with screen readers is that they limit the blind to a "linear stream of information" rather than allowing them to scan the screen as a whole as the sighted can do. But even those with vision, he said, are still stuck within a fairly linear, if layered, structure that forces them to click from headline to story to a link within a story to get to the content they want.

"I'm interested in seeing how we can rewrite that page so the content most relevant to the user becomes more accessible," Bigham said. By working on this from the perspective of the blind, he has gained insight into how Web surfing might be made better -- or at least less linear -- for the rest of us.

Sangyun Hahn is a blind UW doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering who inspired Ladner on another front. Hahn, who was made blind from failed eye surgery as a 6-year-old in Korea, came to the UW in 2001 after excelling in artificial intelligence and linguistics studies in Seoul.

To help with his studies, Hahn was equipped with a hand-held computer that translates text into Braille. But he quickly discovered that there was no similar technology allowing him to rapidly read the many computer diagrams in his texts.

"I wasn't getting very good grades," Hahn said with a laugh. Ladner suggested they work together to develop a system for translating visual images into something that could be read like Braille.

Thus was born the Tactical Graphics project, which received nearly $1 million in support from the National Science Foundation. The result is a program that can rapidly transform a visual image into a touch-based image of bumps on paper that the blind can handle and read as easily as text.

Ladner held up one such tactical image made from a photo of a solar flare coming off the surface of the sun, which looked more like a work of art than a scientific illustration.

"This is available for use right now," Hahn said. The goal, he said, is to offer this to an organization that can widely develop it so blind students at all levels of study have ready access to visual information as well as text.

The list of such projects with Ladner's name attached to them goes on and on, with names like AccessMonkey (a Web page translation project) or WebinSitu (a project that collects data on access problems for the blind). Ladner helps run summer programs for deaf and blind students aimed at inspiring an interest in science, engineering and math. He also does outreach on disabilities issues unrelated to the UW or his research.

Given all of this activity he's spawned, and the fact that he was raised by deaf parents, you might think this has been his lifetime's work. But, at 65 years old, he said he only recently threw himself into access issues for the disabled.

"My parents were teachers of the deaf, and I grew up around the deaf community," Ladner said. But he said he never really gave it much thought or even learned much sign language as a young man. His parents were highly intelligent, capable people who happened to be deaf.

Ladner will be one of nine recipients of a $10,000 Encore award -- named to signify a bold new path late in life -- at Stanford University on Friday, sponsored by a philanthropic organization called Civic Ventures. It's not the first recognition he's won for his new calling, and it's unlikely to be his last.

"I don't see barriers," Ladner said. "I see opportunities."

P-I reporter Tom Paulson can be reached at 206-448-8318 or tompaulson at seattlepi.com.