Here's an article I found intresting.
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."
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alex Jurgensen" <[email protected]>
To: "General discussions on all topics relating to the use of Mac OS
X by
theblind" <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2009 1:17 PM
Subject: Re: iPhone accessibility
Hi,
No, I am.
Thanks for listening,
Alex,
On 4-Jan-09, at 10:12 AM, David Poehlman wrote:
I think it might be tv raman.
On Jan 4, 2009, at 12:36 PM, E.J. Zufelt wrote:
Good afternoon,
I see on the VIPBC page that there is reference to a Google code
project for a screen-reader on the iPhone. I was pretty sure that
making a screen-reader for the iPhone platform would be impossible
because of application sandboxing. I cannot figure out who the
project owner is. I'd love to talk more about this project if
anyone, particularly the manager, is interested.
Thanks,
Everett
