oh, I love this and this is why I have always struggled with windows
assistive technology for the blind. As a blind person, I learned the
elephant and the three blind men story at an early age and was taught
to think from the top down or from out to in. Of course, it helps in
any situation to know how to think both ways but you need to know that
there are two ways and that there really is a whole something in order
for the parts to actually make sense. This can be applied to
spelling. you have a whole word, its parts and the individual
characters that make up the individual parts of the word/string and
the direction of flow if there is one like does the item make more
sense when viewed upside down? on its side? from some other angle? I
remember learning about rotating images, it opened up a whole new
world. Many blind people I have known will take an object and feel of
it from one perspective and never think to turn it around and touch it
from different angles.
There is an interesting free piece of software available for windows
that demonstrates the whole view approach at:
http://www.seeingwithsound.com
called the vOICe learning edition. the OIC stands for oh, I see! This
software turns an image into sound which when reconverted through an
oscillascope renders the exact same image that was converted so we
know we are getting an exact representation. Each pixel is examined
and based on the analesis, the sonnification produces an audible
rendering of the immage. This method of sensory substitution is quite
encouraging because it allows for processing of all the raw data
rather than preinterpretation such that loud pixels are bright and
pixels that are higher in the view are higher in pitch. So, all that
to say that you hear the entire image and then you pick out the
individual parts of the images by listening to it. the image is
sliced vertically such that it takes one second to sweep the image
horrizontally in one direction usually left to right. Wearing a
headset, you can hear the locations within the image of each part of
the image and with training, many people can "see" the image. It
should be noted that this process of seeing with sound is best suited
to pre-sighted individuals according to research but I have never had
sight and can discern images although it does not feel like seeing to
me. This can be highly useful for instance to look at images on web
pages and identify them without alt tags.
On Jan 6, 2009, at 9:33 AM, erik burggraaf wrote:
Hi Mike, This is what I call the dropped penny approach.
The penny drop was an orientation exercize my sister and I had to do
when we were kids, and it says a lot about the way blind people work
vs sighted people. The approach isn't rong, it's just different.
When a penny falls on the grownd, a sighted person steps back, takes
in the scene at a glance and focuses in on the penny so they can pick
it up. This is the approach voiceover takes.
When the same penny falls on the ground, a blind person listens to the
sound, chooses a point of reference such as a table leg or the toe of
a shoe, and sircles out concentricly in the direction of the sound
until the penny is found. This is the windows approach.
In windows for example, you are on a link, in a table, on a web page,
in a browser, on the desktop.
Conversely in mac, you are on the desktop, in a browser, on a web
page, in a table, on a link, that has text. Both approaches are good,
but blind people are not taught top down or outside in the way sighted
people are. They are taught bottom up or inside out. Or in other
words, first identify something by it's parts and then identify the
whole thing based on information about it's parts, instead of
identifying the whole thing at a glance and then zeroing in on each
part to see how it fits with the whole.
The new mac user coming over from windows may look at the way
voiceover works and think, "Oh my lord! That's not intuitive at all!",
but of course it is extremely intuitive once you rap your mind around
it.
Best,
erik burggraaf
Certified Technician
Assistive Computing LTD Support and training
Sales department: 888-828-2445
Support and Training: 888-255-5194
Email: [email protected]
Website coming soon
On 5-Jan-09, at 4:39 PM, Mike Arrigo wrote:
I find what confuses some people with voice over is the whole
interacting thing, I think it's pretty simple, you could just call
it zooming in or focusing in on an item, but that confuses some
people.
On Jan 5, 2009, at 2:51 AM, David Poehlman wrote:
Hello all,
One thing I have observed about the mac which has been different
from most if not all of my windows experiences is that when I read
the manual for my macs and the os and vo materials, I was able to
do anything I needed to do with the mac and the os because either
there were keyboard comands built-into the os or into vo. The most
startling thing though was how my knowledge of vo helped me with
the system in general when I was reading the user guides.
If you want to read the user guide for your mac, there is a folder
on the hd called user guides and information which has the welcome
to leopard guide and the user guide for your computer along with
another document or two. These work well in preview and give you
some vo practice.
