[accessibleimage] Re: Imagine Cup, Kurzweil-NFB Reader, Black Sun, art sculpture park

Peter,

I'm a bit afraid that Symbian is going to die on the vine.  I haven't heard
of too many new Symbian phones and the Windows Mobile and Windows Smart
Phone are all over the press these days.  Even Palm has dropped their own OS
on the Trio for Windows Mobile so I don't see Symbian lasting much longer.
It was a well designed and reasonably open system that required too much
horsepower at its outset and is just too incompatible with the rest of the
world to remain viable as the MS based phones are growing increasingly less
expensive.

Our project will have OCR on the iPAQ type PDA phones as well as on the
Smart Phones that Verizon is selling these days.  Code Factory will have its
MSP for Smart Phone out by September which sort of puts Talx into a strange
position.  I know Nuance has some sort of pseudo screen reader for WM so
maybe Torsten can whip up a Talx for Windows Mobile pretty quickly.  I'm not
sure.

The lack of competition on yet another platform is pretty scary.  I can't
say I'm happy to see MS take over another market but it just doesn't feel
like their competitors want to play to win.  Palm had an enormous lead with
their own hardware, the Visor units, Blackberry, etc. but all now look a bit
old and ugly compared to the shiny new Windows products.  A few Linux and
Motorola Java and J2ME based phones came and disappeared pretty quickly and
the only one that talked at all is the Oasis which, although open source and
supported by some really cool people, just can't keep up.

Apple puts a "blinks not welcome" sign on everything they build so even the
next generation iPod models with mobile phones in them will be based on the
wholly proprietary, closed systems that they are notorious for building.

I hate to say it but never bet against Microsoft.  In 2005, they finally
grew past 50% of the worldwide server sales so their winning on the big,
middle and little all at once.  

Accessibility wise, though, MS has been and remains the best game in town
and Rob and his crew up at their ATG want to make every device accessible as
quickly as they can.  MBJ and my other friends down at Apple have similar
motives but, alas, their bosses don't give them the resources that MS gives
the ATG crowd.

Rambling...

cdh 

-----Original Message-----
From: accessibleimage-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:accessibleimage-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Peter Meijer
Sent: Tuesday, July 04, 2006 11:58 AM
To: accessibleimage@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [accessibleimage] Re: Imagine Cup, Kurzweil-NFB Reader, Black Sun,
art sculpture park

Hi Lisa,

My understanding is that The vOICe MIDlet should run on the
high end Java-enabled camera phones from HTC (still untested
though), allowing you to directly hear graphics and identify
colors. Since these phones are running Windows Mobile, they
should be compatible with all the applications and features
that Chris mentions, such as Mobile Speak, OCR and likely GPS.
So there is some possibility that there will come a device
that can do it all, albeit with some inevitable performance
limitations - which may be where your "user takes it home"
part chimes in. Similar developments may also take place for
the Symbian based camera phones, such as the Nokia camera
phones with Talks or Mobile Speak.

Best wishes,

Peter Meijer


The vOICe for Mobile Camera Phone and PDA
http://www.seeingwithsound.com/midlet.htm


Lisa Yayla wrote:
> Hi Chris,
> Wonderful!
> When I read about the the Kurzweil-NFB Reader I thought that perhaps
> this type of tool could also affect other things. The question of
> graphics, I was thinking about a solution for putting descriptions of
> pictures on the page. Picture description, in a very small font size,
> could be placed in a fixed area of a newspaper, magazine, etc and than
> the camera could read it. This additional text could be printed very
> small so that it wouldn't take much space.The reader would know to check
> say the lower left hand corner for descriptive text. I saw a example of
> very fine text, where a few sentences of it looked like a line and one
> needed a magnifying glass to read it. If such text would be placed in
> the same place.  Graphics could also be done this way, a line map could
> be made very small, read by the camera, user takes it home, blows it up
> and embosses it out. To do such a thing would be dependent upon printing
> techniques. What do you think?
> Your tool sounds like it will also be very popular with everyone sighted
> as well as visually impaired.
> 
> Best,
> Lisa

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