Re: Screen readers and how to develop them: A historical perspective
- From: Alex Midence <alex.midence@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2010 08:14:13 -0600
Hi, Don,
For someone like you, braille isn't a viable solution. Your case is
special and understandable. You can't read braille unless you can
feel your way across a line. About the most sensitive organ remaining
to you short of your tongue for this purpose is probably the tip of
your nose and, that would be ... well ... Let's just say that audio
tech is a wonderful thing. We can't have folks giggling at us when we
read, you know. =) I'm talking about kids who grew up blind and have
two perfectly functioning index fingers (never could read with my
pinky, can anyone?) and a mind to go with them. They should be able
to use both braille and audio to good effect.
alex M
On 12/20/10, Don Marang <donald.marang@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> My older sister was upset at me because I was unable to learn braille! My
> remaining fingers are just too insensitive now from nerve damage and endless
> blood tests. She has been a teacher at a blind school for at least 20 years
> and is a huge advocate for braille litercy. She even reads braille while
> she is driving!
>
> Don Marang
>
> There is just so much stuff in the world that, to me, is devoid of any real
> substance, value, and content that I just try to make sure that I am working
> on things that matter.
> Dean Kamen
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> From: "Alex Midence" <alex.midence@xxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Monday, December 20, 2010 6:03 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 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, 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 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/david/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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