Think, maybe things are just a bit too new. 3D printing has not yet become much useful, merely a funny hobby for some people. Treu enough, certain companies see the potential here, and want to be in front of the development, hence they already tell the market they are specializing on this kind of service. And, I agree, likely we will see certain smaller products in the future, being printed. If not on a home-based private scale in the first turn, I wonder if we soon enough will see certain manufacturers letting their dealers print on demand.
The potential is great enough. And, the savings as well, I'd imagine. Why should a manufacturer produce, stock-keeep and ship a large amount of products, that he does not even know if will be selling? Likewise, why should a dealer bother to order in 100 units, if he may end up with only selling 3, and then having to recirculate the 97 left-overs - including all the cost of this? Much better then, to simply print on demand, the units the customer calls for. and for a manufacturer to develop the blueprint, may not be anything apart from what he already is doing. That is, except from he then would have to publish the blueprints. Yet, all of that is on a business scale, and likely no blind would be able to operate these things effectively, and quickly enough, for quite some time still. And as for the home-user, I think there still will be a couple of years, before this becomes cheap and "Easy" enough, that the home-market will really embrace the idea. Even sighted people, who will spend three hours, and ten tries with bad results, before they come out with something that might just happen to work somehow - well, not even most sighted people will accept those conditions. Likely, the accessibility market, won't look into these things - until the day it is becoming normal enough in use, that it is considered worth the many hours of trying to figure something. My guess is, that the day you can log into some kind of webpage, and scroll through a selection of fully working blueprints for the different gadgets, well then also the manufacturers of screen reader and the like, will throw some efforts into making the printing software available for us. After all, maybe there won't be a need for any real extra efforts, if all you need to do is, to download a file, and send it to the printer. Who knows, if even newer versions of Microsoft Office - or the like - will just offer such a feature right out of the box. When comes to a blind person trying to "construct" some kind of a product, from bottom and up, I am afraid we will have to dream. At least, for a long time yet. Your idea about some sort of premade features, where you can select threading, length and diameter of a screw from a list, is well enough; and likely will be fully possible. That's not much more than selecting font and size, for a normal print-out of your school project today. But to have things totally fitting, we cannot just talk about millimeters, or 1/25 of an inch, in accuracy. You would have to work on units far less than that, and for a blind person to know exactly where it is, that he has to change a setting, would have to mass-produce speech from his synthesizer, leaving him bewildered in what imention he is currently focused, and where he will need to adjust. For a sighted person, this can all be done with the glance of an eye. Even if you make one adjustment - in one end of a picture - the sighted person will imediately see what effect it has on the rest of the product, in all directions and dimentions. Even on a computer screen. For a blind person, to make one change in the one end, and then having to somehow scroll through the rest of the picture, noticing any difference... Well, I just don't think it is possible. After all, what we here are discussing, is nothing much different from picture management, already known to the general computer guy, for a long, long time. How many users on this list, have ever tried performing any photo manipulation, even if their computer is fully capable of doing it? My interest would be quite arised to know of any blind person who cut, paste and manipulates his photo collection, all on his own - by help of his screen reader. regards, ----- Original Message ----- From: RicksPlace To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, December 25, 2013 12:01 PM Subject: Re: Anyone working with 3D printing software Apps Hi: I havent given the actual process of accessibility much thought other than to try and figure out if current software would be accessible. The process of creating an object might include creating parts for the completed object and then assembling the parts for anything really of use to most folks like computers, microwaves and the like. For these complex items a larger industrial type of printer would be required in any case. For home use smaller objects, simpler, wmight be able to be made of a few materials and with limited assembly required. Simple printed circut boards should be no problem, switches, handles, cases, and much more could be produced on small personal printers in the near future I think. I doubt mass production which uses molds and stamping to build things would be replaced since they are faster and likely less expensive to use to create mass quantities of standardized objects. That said, add in storage and shipping and handling and you could get some of these things being made via printer due to cost advantages on many things we now think of as low-volume expensive items. Buy some gold and gem stones and create a nice ring. The process of making the software accessible would be more a matter of making the templates, blueprints, accessible to work with for the blind. This would take much planning and have accessibility in mind when designing the tools to create and modify templates. Off the top of my head I could see some form of object selection with properties and methods as a way to design objects which might yield accessibility as a reasonable methodology as we use for programming logical objects. Select a screw from a list of predefined objects, a threading option, size otpions and where it is to go in the blueprint and the program would build one for you. It would also ensure that the target hole will fit the screw automatically and, if you want, even generate the screw automatically with the click of a mouse or other keyboard operation. To create the Threaded hole you could specify a location on the desired object using 3d coordinates, visual pointer or some other methodology of locating positions on more complex objects. The use of 3d scanners would also come into play big time for many of us since we could scan an object, select a material, color etc... again properties and methods, and have an object created which should all be accessible enough. There are 3d printers being located in stores and even some public libraries currently so this is not something that needs to be delayed or the software developed to create and manage blueprints will be so far removed from accessibility that the larger companies will just never implement any accessibility hooks and be able to get away with it like IBM and some other large companies do with other software platforms and packages. Anyway, I thought I'd ask if anyone was playing with a 3d printer to see if someone out there was considering accessibility with this new technology and so far it appears not. Rick USA ----- Original Message ----- From: LB To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, December 24, 2013 2:19 PM Subject: Re: Anyone working with 3D printing software Apps Hi Rick, Back again, the 3D printer was used by the great dummy man who made faces for his dummies using the 3D printer. An interesting thing for it was on the Bio channel several weeks ago and very interesting. Such things like that could be useful I think it depends on one's imagination. As David mentioned, when doing each layer there would be a nice voice to state what is being done at that moment, but lots of information would be needed from the data source... Bruce and Bronx, (Woof!) Sent: Tuesday, December 24, 2013 9:03 AM Subject: Re: Anyone working with 3D printing software Apps Hi: Allot of the things rely on cad type software, likely not accessible. Most of the cool stuff requires blueprints to make parts for things like screws and other parts that require exact fitting based on the design. Anyway, it may become a means of building things like replacement parts for objects you have and dont want to lose and much more me thinks. Rick USA ----- Original Message ----- From: David To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, December 24, 2013 8:48 AM Subject: Re: Anyone working with 3D printing software Apps Don't think there will be much for 3D printing - at least not if you don't happen to have a fair amount of sight left. I have never touched a 3D printer, or any of its software. Yet, I do know, they are slowly coming down in price, and also becoming available for the general user. Yet, the whole nature of 3D, may not be much easy to produce in a way that makes any sense to a person with little or no vision. Of course, you could have the speech tell you a good amount of information, or the Braille display throw a number of messages on your fingers, to let you know what you are about to do - or even, what has already started to take place. :) Really, we are already working with 2D. And see how much chatter the computer is throwing at us already. Not sure, if I want to try imagine - based on a chattering synthesizer - what my end product will look like. it is kind of hard enough with the two dimentions, leave the third one alone. :) OK, if you, or anyone else want to shoulder the task of making something work for me, then I am quite interested in seeing your results. I just have my doubts, if it will be much convenient to work with. Of course, one way to get around it, would be to use certain sound effects along with the speech, to illustrate the things taking place in the different dimentions. Just don't know really... :) ----- Original Message ----- From: RicksPlace To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, December 24, 2013 2:31 PM Subject: Re: Anyone working with 3D printing software Apps Thanks and Merry Christmas Bruce to you and your family big time! Rick USA ----- Original Message ----- From: LB To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, December 24, 2013 7:20 AM Subject: Re: Anyone working with 3D printing software Apps Hi Rick, Yea, I was hungry and made a slice of pizza with it! Just joking, got to leave, but want to wish you and everyone a Merry Christmas. Besides, I think our government spent millions using or trying to use a 3D computer to make pizza for the astronauts, or Washington D.C. Astro nuts! Merry Christmas Bruce Sent: Tuesday, December 24, 2013 6:08 AM Subject: Anyone working with 3D printing software Apps Hi: 3D printing is nuts futurable and will, I think, get tied into the internet for communications, transport, of items between home computers some day (Can you say StarTrek?) if not today. I started looking into 3d printing but it seems to use allot of cad type software among other styles of designing objects along with scanning. Has anyone started playing with a 3d printer / scanner and is there any potential of using a DeskTop App or even mobile App with WindowEyes to have accessibility to template design software? Rick USA -------------------------------------------------------------------- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active.
