[blindza] Fwd: Smartphone cameras bring independence to blind people
- From: Jacob Kruger <blindza@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: blind@xxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2011 10:58:02 +0200
FWIW, something like the vOICe might help aiming when taking photos, but not
too sure of platform/usage details of the vizwiz service, but, have, in past
done my own version - take photo with phone, using vOICe to help with aim, and
then send an MMS to a sighted friend, etc.
Stay well
Jacob Kruger
Blind Biker
Skype: BlindZA
'...fate had broken his body, but not his spirit...'
----- Original Message ---------------
Subject: [The vOICe] Smartphone cameras bring independence to blind people
From: Peter Meijer <feedback@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2011 09:50:09 +0200
To: seeingwithsound@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi All,
For your information. Appended is an article from today's BBC News.
Best wishes,
Peter Meijer
Seeing with Sound - The vOICe
http://www.seeingwithsound.com/winvoice.htm
Smartphone cameras bring independence to blind people.
By Damon Rose Editor, BBC Ouch!
Snapping an image with your smartphone camera brings more than just a pretty
picture if you are blind. With the right app, it can increase your independence.
Knowing what food is inside a packet or details about the post which has just
arrived on your doormat are everyday things that most people take for granted.
Blind people have traditionally sought this kind of visual information from
family and friends, or from an employed personal assistant. But this has meant
having to fit in with other people's time or spend significant money on help.
Now there are an increasing number of alternatives.
As smart phones become more accessible, some with built in speech and Braille
output, it is possible for people with sight loss to get slivers of visual
assistance when there's no one else around to ask.
Want to know what colour your shirt is? Use a colour detector app. Want to know
if it is still daylight outside? Use a light detector app. Want to read a notice
on your work's noticeboard? Use a text recognition app, of course.
What's in this jar?
The most recent visual assistance product to hit the app store is VizWiz. As
well as giving you automated image recognition from intelligent software, it
throws your questions open to a small band of volunteers standing-by on the
internet - a human cloud, willing to donate ten seconds of their time here and
there to describe photos which come in.
On its website, the VizWiz is described as: "Take a Picture, Speak a Question,
and Get an Answer".
The free app and service, developed by the University of Rochester in New York,
has received between ten and 12 thousand questions in its first two months. The
volunteers are made up of staff and students who receive a sound alert when a
question arrives, either via Twitter, text message or the web. They tap in a
response which is received by the original sender.
"The most popular type of question is a product that they have which has text
written on it, a label with instructions. People want to know what it says, how
to cook it or when it expires," said Professor Jeff Bigham, the man behind the
service.
"We can very clearly track the time of day," explained Prof. Bigham.
"In the morning people are asking about clothing, the colour or pattern. A few
people ask if their shirt matches their pants."
"Around one or two eastern time we start getting questions about wine from what
we assume is the UK, asking what label, what year, that kind of thing."
It is this kind of subjective answer that a piece of software can't give and
that a human service can. But humans need sleep. Prof. Bigham admits that,
though computer scientists are famed for staying up very late, the 6am to 7am
timeslot can be a bit difficult to fill with volunteers from the university.
Human cloud.
"It's a really exciting time to work in access technology. A great new resource
is that there are people out there on the web. Everyone is connected and we can
do a lot of interesting things with it," he said.
"People have been throwing around terms like Human Cloud for a while, and Crowd
in the Cloud.
"A lot of work which happened in crowd sourcing before it, took time. Like
Wikipedia, it 'took time' for articles to emerge. What's interesting with our
service is the realtime aspect of it. Someone out there needs help from the
cloud and, in almost real time, they get it."
Users know that it is humans at the other end and this has generated some
"crazy" questions that could never have been answered by automated recognition
software.
"We had one person who kept taking a picture of the sky and asking 'what is
this"' every 5 minutes for a couple of hours," said Prof. Bigham.
"I had no idea what was going on. It also happens we loosely monitor Twitter.
Someone later tweeted 'VizWiz just helped me watch the sunset'."
Blind photography.
In a perhaps unexpected 21st century development, blind people are now finding
they need to learn the basics of photography in order to take advantage of the
growing number of text and image recognition services on smart phones.
How do you hold the camera up? And how close do you put it to the object you
want to know more about? Angles, perspective, distance and light, are concepts
that don't come naturally to people who have never been able to see.
Steve Nutt is an IT consultant in Hertfordshire who has been blind since birth.
It took him two weeks to master how to frame a shot which he does in a very
functional way, quite different to how sighted people would do it.
He explains: "If you're taking a picture of, say, a tin, you need to make sure
you get the whole tin in there. I would stand it up so you get all the sides
with the label and snap from about 8 inches above it.
"If you are taking a picture of some text on a piece of paper, centralise the
camera and lift it up about ten inches. Keep your hand dead straight and dead
still when taking the image.
"You have to also bear in mind the size of the thing you're taking the picture
of. the smaller the thing, the closer you need to be to it ... I'd be lying if I
said it was easy."
Jeff Bigham's team sees the results of the camerawork coming from users like
Steve. Not everyone gets it right with their first shot.
"We definitely get a few attempts sometimes. It's not always easy to frame the
photos. Sometimes the centre is out of the photo. if they're asking what is on a
can of soup label, we generally say 'we can't tell what this is, the label is
likely on the other side of the can'."
Source URL:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14505748
----------
To send a message to the list, send any message to blindza@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
----------
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to blindza-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
with 'unsubscribe' in the subject line
---
The 'homepage' for this list is at http://www.blindza.co.za
Other related posts:
- » [blindza] Fwd: Smartphone cameras bring independence to blind people - Jacob Kruger
