[Tactile-Talk] Optacon

[Seeing Hands]

Responding to "What the Monarch doesn’t do is provide a remote camera a 
person could place on a hard surface to read print."

Although it would be quite expensive, I think that you could implement 
that easily enough. By scanning an image, you could render it on the 
display, including zooming in and out to enlarge the tactile 
representation of an area. The trickiest part would be getting the 
remote camera sufficiently focused on the document, with the largest 
risk being that mistaken camera placement occludes important areas. If 
we imagine placing a page on a scanner, that risk would decrease 
significantly.

I am too young to have experienced an Optacon, and consequently my 
expectations of what one is like may be faulty, but it seems that you 
could achieve this on a Monarch, although with a device more expensive 
and less portable than could theoretically be accomplished by trying to 
reproduce it directly.

On 9/20/2024 14:54, dan.tevelde--- via Tactile-Talk wrote:
>
> That’s well and good but I can’t afford the Monarch. I’m moving next 
> month and looking for a new job. What the Monarch doesn’t do is 
> provide a remote camera a person could place on a hard surface to read 
> print. I often run into situations where using OCR isn’t precise 
> enough. I want to feel the images and not just see the text in Braille 
> or listen to it being read by a screenreader.
>
> Dan
>
> Dan
>
> *From:*Tactile-Talk <tactile-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org> *On Behalf Of 
> *Ken Perry via Tactile-Talk
> *Sent:* Friday, September 20, 2024 1:29 PM
> *To:* 'Tactile Talk for the discussion of the display and use of 
> graphics on refreshable Braille platforms' <tactile-talk at nfbnet.org>
> *Cc:* kperry at blinksoft.com
> *Subject:* Re: [Tactile-Talk] Optacon
>
> You can look at symbols with Graphiti and monarck.  I have a whole 
> file of greak letters which is cool to look at but you can do all 
> punctuation
>
> *From:*Tactile-Talk <tactile-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org> *On Behalf Of 
> *dan.tevelde--- via Tactile-Talk
> *Sent:* Friday, September 20, 2024 1:56 PM
> *To:* 'Tactile Talk for the discussion of the display and use of 
> graphics on refreshable Braille platforms' <tactile-talk at nfbnet.org>
> *Cc:* dan.tevelde at comcast.net
> *Subject:* [Tactile-Talk] Optacon
>
> I’m changing the subject line to reflect Chad’s message and his 
> mentioning of an optacon. Welcome Chad to the list. I recently got a 
> an optacon but need to re-learn how to use it. I wish there was a new 
> optacon which would take advantage of today’s technology. I’ve run 
> into situations where I needed to know the print equivalent of a 
> Braille symbol. I was talking with a sighted person who kept 
> inconsistently using the terms bracket and brace. He described what 
> they looked like visually but that didn’t mean anything to me. The 
> emerging graphics displays are beyond my budget. I’m subscribed to an 
> optacon list where we have occasionally talked about developing a new 
> optacon. Unfortunately, the person driving the project just died. His 
> name was Noel Runyan. Another reason an optacon would be helpful is 
> when the primary and secondary relationships in a table change. If I 
> run into a situation like that when I scan something with a phone, 
> VoiceOver incorrectly reads the data because the hierarchy has 
> changed. It will read the left column before reading the right column. 
> With an optacon, a person could manually pan a camera and read data in 
> whatever order they wanted. When one of the main developers of the 
> optacon, James Bliss was still alive, I wrote him an extensive 
> proposal of how I thought a new optacon could work.
>
> Dan
>
>
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