Charles,
We have all been following your updates regarding the development for
the new Optacon. One thing that crossed my mind, I wanted to ask you.
Does the new model have any feature for connecting two Optacons parallel?
What i am thinking of, is that a blind student can use his Optacon for
reading some material. We know that the old Optacon 1 and 2, both had
connectors for a visual display, which would let the sighted teacher
keep track of what the blind person actually was feeling in his finger.
A really nice feature of the Optacon. But one thing I missed with the
previous models, was the chance of connecting my Optacon, with that of
someone else. If now the new model could have a way for the blind
teacher, to feel a copy of the actual dispaly of his blind student, it
would greatly increase the chance for a blind-to-blind instruction.
Even if we go outside the classroom, this kind of feature might be
worth. Say I am to help someone blind getting used to their new
microwave, and she moves her Optacon around the keys and dispaly of the
oven. I then - as things stand today - will have to keep asking her
"what do you feel", and depend solely on what she explains to me. Had I
a chance of feeling a copy of her Optacon directly myself, I could have
told her to move up a bit, turn down the contrast, do something about
the magnification, or whatever.
Being able to teach blind-to-blind, might also be one way of promoting
the introduction and usage of a new Optacon model. If we will depend on
new users learning things through a sighted person, we first will have
to convince the sighted world we really need to learn using the Optacon.
And isn't that one of the main reasons things stand the way they do: We
never really got through with that conviction? So if a blind could
encourage the usage of a new Optacon directly to another blind person,
we have skipped at least one obstacle on the marketing path, I would think.
Of course, the connection between the two Optacons could have been done
through a USB like cable. But to optimize the thing, I could have wished
for the alternative of some sort of wireless connection between the two
units.
Don't know whether you have already taken steps for such a feature,
Charles, or if it is possible to implement the feature this state of the
development. And it might be worth to hear what other users think about
the necessarity of such a feature. So the idea hereby has been thrown on
the board, and I will leave it for the community for further discussion.
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