RE: Screen readers and how to develop them: A historical perspective
- From: "Rasmussen, Lloyd" <lras@xxxxxxx>
- To: "programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2010 08:36:44 -0500
Braille produced on computers in the 50's and 60's (for individual use by
programmers) was done by modifying a line printer, putting soft material behind
the paper and hammering out asterisks in a braille pattern. It only worked on
thin paper, and didn't hold up well.
The first refreshable braille display was made by Oleg Tretiakoff in France in
about 1975. His company became Elinfa, and his displays eventually ended up at
Triformation Systems (now Enabling Technologies).
After reading that article, I looked up Votrax on Wikipedia and found some
reasonably accurate information. I Followed that with the Speech Synthesis
History Project of the Smithsonian Institution, cited by the Wikipedia article.
Between 1986 and 2002 the National Museum of American History collected a lot
of information that would interest blind technology fans. There you can read
some things about the history of Eloquence, Kurzweil, Votrax, Telesensory
Systems, Infovox, DecTalk, Haskins Laboratories, Bell Labs and other speech
technology research which we take for granted today.
And I also decry the lack of braille instruction and expectations.
Lloyd Rasmussen, Senior Project Engineer
National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
Library of Congress 202-707-0535
http://www.loc.gov/nls
The preceding opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the
Library of Congress, NLS.
-----Original Message-----
From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Alex Midence
Sent: Monday, December 20, 2010 6:04 PM
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Screen readers and how to develop them: A historical perspective
Glad you liked it. I was hoping someone on this list would have personal
recollections of this time and the tech available. Neat how there was braille
output as far back as the 50's. It's a shame that that stuff is stil as
expensive as it is. Perhaps, some day, as happened with speech technology,
blind people will see the price of a braille display drop to something
affordable as in, under a thousand dollars? Same for a braille
printer/embosser. I am enormously concerned at how many of the blind kids I
have met recently have poor braille reading skils and don't really seem to care
that they are bordering on illiteracy. Having something or someone read to you
is not the same as direct input from a written document to your mind without an
intermediary. In this age of electronic texts, you would think that braille
would explode in popularity since you no longer have to fill a room with tomes
of the stuff.
Alex M
On 12/20/10, Rasmussen, Lloyd <lras@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> That was fascinating. Dr. Stoffel worked at NIH for a period after he
> wrote that article. I could go on and on about this ancient
> technology, but had better do it off-list.
>
> People had produced braille from computers since the 50's. The first
> speech for a blind computer user was for Jim Willows, an engineer at
> the Lawrence-Livermore Laboratories in 1968 (letters and numbers
> played out through a digital-to-analog converter).
>
> The context of this article ... Votrax devices had been on the market
> for several years, but the SC-01 chip was put into the Type 'n Talk in 1981.
> This device had built-in letter-to-sound rules, so you didn't have to
> send phonemes to it as you did the earlier V S A and VSB boards.
> These three
> devices
which took RS-232 data and either acted like terminals or interpreted
> terminal sequences and sent the data along through another serial port
> to be displayed. They were not screen readers running on the computer
> whose screen was being read. It was revolutionary to think that you
> could buy a $300 Type 'n Talk instead of a $5,000 talking terminal to
> speak the data coming from an RS-232 device. The Echo II synthesizer
> (using the T I
> technology) was added to the Apple II at about this time. By the end
> of
> 1983 there were screen readers for the Apple II and for the IBM PC.
>
> I worked a little bit with the FSST-3 and the VERT terminal, and heard
> Deane Blazie demonstrate the TotalTalk at various conventions.
>
>
>
> Lloyd Rasmussen
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Alex
> Midence
> Sent: Monday, December 20, 2010 3:24 PM
> To: programmingblind
> Subject: Screen readers and how to develop them: A historical
> perspective
>
> Hi, all..
>
> I thought this was rather interesting. It is an article written in
> 1982 about some of the techniques used back then to write screne
> readers or "talking terminals" as they called them. I was struck by
> some of the predictions the author made with regard to the future,
> some of wich came true and others which did not. There was also a
> very interesting section on speech synthesis and how to get the
> hardware and software to do many of the things we take for granted
> nowadays like starting and stopping speech, repeating previously
> spoken text, deciding what to say as an acronym and what to speak as a
> word, punctuation levels and so forth. It was fascinating stuff.
>
> http://web.archive.org/web/20060625225004/http://www.edstoffel.com/dav
> id/talkingterminals.html
>
> Oh yeah, and get a load of the prices for that stuff! Keep in mind
> that was in 1980's money too. Put like a 33% markup on it and you
> might approximate what it would cost in today's money.
>
> Alex M
> __________
__________
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