Al Gilman followed up Roger Jones, and suggested looking
at what media labs at MIT have done.  I have been following
this, through the wearables list.  In fact the discussions
on FM have been inconclusive.  The idea of radio broadcast
communication was not discussed.  I think this is a very
interesting idea.  One of the main differences between
technology discussed for wearables and that for blind people
is cost.  Since most blind people are either elderly or
out of work, the facilities need to be really cheap.
Modifying a radio set to receive special data broadcast
should be quite cheap.  In fact radio sets designed to
receive digital radio could receive data at no extra
cost.  What's happening to the price of such radios?
The ease of tuning makes digital radio particularly
attractive to blind people.

I'd be happy to continue this discussion off-line, Roger.
There seems to be limited interest in the blind-dev list.

Cheers from Chiswick,

John
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In message <[log in to unmask]>
[log in to unmask] writes:

> to follow up on what RB Jones said:
>
> > Our company has been researching transmitting data over the existing
> > radio FM bands. It occured to us that there may be some applications
> > which would assist people who are blind or visually impaired. It should
> > be possible for instance, to send information to a mobile person who
> > uses a screen reader or similar device.
> >
> > Since we have not before worked on a project specifically for persons
> > who are blind, we were looking for input from more knowedgeable people.
> > Do you think there is any use for such technology, configured for
> > applications for people who are blind? What type of data would people be
> > interested in receiving and in what format? The types of things which
> > are currently being done includes pager services and remote billboard
> > management.
> >
> > Please send any replies to [log in to unmask] as I do not normally
> > monitor this group.
> >
>
> Roger,
>
> I think that the distinguishing thing about FM-band mobile
> data services would be that there is relatively small bandwidth
> and relatively wide area coverage.  This suggests services for
> which the demand is sparsely distributed and not great in overall
> quantity.  Applications for the blind are more likely to want
> to buy their wireless data from the lowest bidder, not from
> a specific data link technology.
>
> Blind people will be interested in mobile (untethered) data
> communication, but they are unlikely to care about the band, per
> se.  It would seem that for services rendered to the blind there
> is an almost total independence between the data communication
> physical medium and the blind-specific nature of the use to which
> the communicated data are put.
>
> It is more likely that there would be blind-specific functions
> developed with, say, infra-red line-of-sight data links to do
> things such as trigger talking signs.  Often the information
> which blind people need in data that others soak up by vision is
> very local in nature.  Line-of-sight frequencies lend themselves
> to content which is different in different locales.
>
> You might want to review what has been done at the MIT Media Lab
> on wearable computing for research suggestive of services for the
> blind that could be delivered over nomadic computing data
> channels.
>
> IMHO
>
> --
> Al Gilman

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