[access-uk] Sight village review 2
- From: "Gary Robinson" <g.robinson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004 15:08:59 +0100
Hi all,
I was at Sight village on Tuesday so I'll chip in with some of what I saw
and heard.
firstly like Ray I have mixed feelings about the venue. There were open
spaces but where it mattered there was still the usual scrum around the
stands which were cramped. I must admit even my guide found it difficult to
find out which stand was which.
I arrived very early on the tuesday and managed to meet with several people
outside the normal stand area to get the latest information/demo.
So here goes...
Jaws, I had a long chat with Eric Damery and sat in on one of the two
presentations which like the Window eyes one were I thought on the low key
side especially for Eric.
The hard facts, Jaws 5.1 (free) will be released at the beginning of August
all things being equal. Interestingly though Eric was using a beta Jaws 6
for his demo, this is expected in sept/october pretty much as usual. The
much trumpeted internet authorised version will ship to new users at this
stage.
New features, well not really, Eric spoke and emonstrated very effectively
the use of HTML place markers(they came in in Jaws 5) you can get Jaws to
automatically speak lines of interest on an HTML page or "virtualise" i.e
put the line into a virtual buffer you can read at will. In 5.1 you will be
able to export the place markers you have set up for web pages
and give them to a fellow Jaws user to make a particular site or HTML
application more user friendly, this isn't affected by screen colour or
resolution settings.
I spent most of my time talking to Eric
about Citrix access, which is also coming last quarter this year, but I
suspect this will be of limited interest to listers so I will not cover it
here.
Ultracane, also known as the bat cane or ultrasonic long cane I along with many
others saw it last year in prototype form, but now it's here for real. The
current production version has a much better formed handle and very clear
vibrating pins, one giving feedback from the upward pointing bean and the
other from the front/downward pointing beam. I tried it out within the
somewhat hostile environment of the exhibition hall and was pleasantly
surprised at just how effective it was. You can adjust the range acording
to how cluttered the environment you are working within is and I was able to
clearly pick out the door opening in a wall from several metres away as well
as people and most usefully overhanging objects. The downside is that it is
nearly £400 not cheap by any standard.
Mobile phones, by chance I happened to be at the same hotel as Thorsten from
Talks so we had a chat over breakfast about some of the issues on choosing a
phone. It only served to confirm my view that the Talks screen reader
approach is by far the best. I understand that WAP browser access is there
(in beta at the moment) however you will need a phone with sufficient phone
memory(thats not the memory card which you can replace/upgrade but the RAM
within the phone itself. If I've remembered correctly the 3650 has 8Mb, the
6600 16Mb and the new 7610(which I saw on Steve's stand) a whopping 64Mb.
The latter is one very nice phone but expensive. Talking of Steve(Computer
room services) he gave me a demo of using Wayfinder(I was amazed how small
it is) to plan a route using Talks on a 6600 as the read out device.
Daisy players, I went along to the RNIB room (it's like In Touch, you feel
you should in case you miss somethingbut afterwards you wonder why you did).
They had 3 of the "over sized bap" style portable DAISY players, the VIBE
from visuaid I think which was almost identical to my Panasonic portable cd
apart from a slight oblong molding on one side, the Easy Daisy, which has
large buttons and the Scholar. The latter were both significantly larger
than the Vibe and unlike it you could not charge your rechargeable batteries
in situ (they were also more expensive).
My personal favourite at the exhibition, the Maestro, a tiny PDA based on one
of the HP IPAQ
units. It's barely larger than a pack of 20 cigarettes but very impressive.
They also have a Braille/Perkins style keyboard for it, which uses Blue
tooth or you could use a standard QWERTy mini folding keyboard. It's not
yet available expect to see it around last quarter of this year, price not
yet fixed but possibly around £800 ish. Interestingly I was told that once
it comes out the Trekker will be based on this PDA as opposed to it's
current larger unit. I could go on about this unit i want one, it just
feels right, the speech was good and of course it runs mainstream Microsoft
Windows Ce applications.
If anyone wants to know more I'll try and rack my brains for more
information.
Gary
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