Paul asked me to forward this article about technology for the visually
impaired computer user, thought some of you might be interested!
From Wall Street Journal:
THE JOURNAL REPORT: TECHNOLOGY
Sightless Surfing
Products are proliferating to help the visually
impaired tap into the Internet
By VICTORIA KNIGHT
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 23, 2005; Page R14
On the day Saddam Hussein was captured in December 2003, Arnold Roth,
chief executive of the Israeli company VirTouch Ltd., decided to give a
little
demonstration of a product his company is developing for visually
impaired Internet surfers.
Mr. Roth, who was in Portland, Ore., for a business meeting, asked
VirTouch programmers back in Israel to take online news stories, photos and
maps
about Saddam's arrest and, using a process created by VirTouch, convert
them into special Web pages he could display at the meeting.
The pages were to resemble those of any news Web site, but with an
important difference: Their entire contents -- including visual images --
would
be in a format a blind person could navigate and absorb using a mouselike
VirTouch tool called the VTPlayer.
Within hours, the completed pages were posted on the Web and in the
hands of Alan Holst, a Los Angeles-based IT consultant who has been blind
since
birth. Guided by audio prompts linked to different elements, he
navigated the pages using the mouse. And he read the headlines and articles
in
Braille, using an already available technology that converts computer-
screen text into raised Braille characters on a connected device -- in this
case, the VTPlayer. The characters are created by tiny metal pins that move
up and down in panels on the surface of the device.
But the pins on the VTPlayer do more than make Braille letters, and
this is what makes the Israeli device unique: The VTPlayer's pins also rise
and
fall according to the outlines and contours of pictures and graphic images
on the computer screen. Thus, Mr. Holst could feel with his fingers what
Saddam's face looked like in a photograph shot moments after he was taken
into
custody -- adding another dimension, literally, to Mr. Holst's
appreciation of the event.
"I was surprised by the length of Saddam's beard," Mr. Holst quips.
Unlocking Potential
Innovative devices and software for years have attempted to help the
visually impaired harness the full potential of personal computers and
the Web. The most common tools are software programs called screen readers,
which use Braille and synthesized-voice prompts to guide users through a
variety of PC programs, like spreadsheets, PowerPoint and more.
However, all but the most basic readers -- those that work only with email
and word
processing -- are expensive, with the most versatile costing around a
thousand dollars. And relatively few Web sites have adopted the code
screen readers need to identify page elements -- a state of affairs that
limits
most blind Internet users to a few familiar addresses.
All of this is changing, slowly, thanks to advances in technology and to
political pressure from governments and advocacy groups. Web sites of
government agencies in both the U.S. and Britain, for example, are now
required by law to be completely accessible to screen readers. This
means all of a site's features must be tagged with a code that screen
readers
use to recognize and identify the feature to the user. Laws protecting the
rights of disabled workers, meanwhile, coupled with pressure from
advocacy groups, are expected to help more blind people enter the workplace
in
the coming years, which in turn should increase demand for more advanced and
affordable assistive products. In the U.S. alone, there are about
250,000 individuals of working age who are considered legally blind, only
around 30% of whom are employed. There are around 10 million people with
visual
disabilities in the U.S.
"The pace of change is accelerating as customers continue to demand
more, which drives the development of new, more complex, technologies with
more powerful features," says Brad Davis, vice president of hardware product
management for Freedom Scientific Inc., a leading maker of screen
readers, in St. Petersburg, Fla. The latest version of its Windows-based
screen
reader, Jaws 6.0, allows Web surfers to replace technical terms used by
Jaws to identify Web page elements, like links, form fields and buttons,
with
labels of the user's own. The standard version retails for $895.
Another Windows-based reader, Window-Eyes, from GW Micro Inc., of Fort
Wayne, Ind., now in its fifth version, supports every text feature and
command in Microsoft Word, including the ability to navigate tables and
columns. Users can find and fix spelling and grammar errors, read
editing comments, and track multiple editing changes, all with keyboard
commands and audible prompts. Window-Eyes 5.0 retails for $795.
Freedom Scientific and GW Micro, tapped by analysts as the industry
leaders, are privately held and won't release sales or profit figures. But
one
indicator of how this market is growing is the recent arrival of a new
competitor: Apple Computer Inc. last month released its new operating
system for Macintosh computers with a screen reader built in.
Apple's move came in response to demand from Macintosh customers,
advocacy groups and government institutions, says Phil Schiller, senior vice
president, world-wide product marketing at Apple. The program, dubbed
VoiceOver, focuses mainly on applications like word processing, email
and Web browsing. It requires the user to learn only one set of commands, no
matter which application is being used. But perhaps most important of
all is the price: At $129 -- included in the price of the new Mac OS X
system
VoiceOver sells at a huge discount to most screen readers.
Price Breakthrough
Louis Herrera, chairman of the technology committee for the California
Council of the Blind Inc., believes VoiceOver will "revolutionize the
way computer accessibility is treated," because it makes assistive
technology far more affordable to blind people with low incomes, and to
potential
employers of the blind. Indeed, a $499 Mac Mini computer with VoiceOver
in the operating system can be purchased for less than the cost of a single
Jaws or Window-Eyes program.
VoiceOver is not without its faults, nor is it as sophisticated as the
main Windows-based screen readers, says Mr. Herrera, who has been blind
since
birth and whose organization, based in Hayward, Calif., provides
services and acts as an advocate for the blind and visually impaired. He
finds
VoiceOver's spell-checker difficult to use, for example, and says
getting VoiceOver to read pull-down menus is tricky. But he expects the
product
to improve, adding, "Apple has built this product into the operating
system, which shows it's committed to it."
Windows-based readers hold a huge lead in this market, reflecting the
dominance of Windows operating systems world-wide. But Microsoft Corp.
has no screen reader of its own. Instead, there is a speech-recognition
feature in Windows that allows users with disabilities to operate their
computers by speech.
A Microsoft spokesman declined to say whether the company plans to
include a basic screen reader in the next version of Windows, codenamed
Longhorn
and expected to be released in 2006. Longhorn could, however, pose a
challenge of a different sort to screen-reader and assistive-product makers.
Software-industry insiders say that Longhorn will present significant
changes in how Windows works and the way in which its applications are
designed. That means development costs for screen-reader makers could
rise significantly -- as they have been already for years -- as they try to
keep their products compatible.
Therein lies the main challenge facing the industry right now: making
increasingly sophisticated products that keep up with changing
technologies. Perhaps nowhere is the challenge greater than in efforts to
promote
wider screen-reader accessibility to Web sites.
For screen readers to work seamlessly on the Web there has to be
cooperation from Web programmers and Web-page designers; they must include
special coding for screen readers to detect and correctly identify different
elements of a page. Without such coding, surfing the Web for the blind
can be, at best, a very frustrating experience.
Jaws user Liz Cooke, a visually impaired editor at the London-based
Royal National Institute of the Blind, says she's comfortable using Jaws
while
working on her PC offline. But the first time she used it to open a Web
page, she says, "Jaws was speaking gibberish. I didn't understand that
he was reading the banner."
A screen reader navigates a coded Web page the same way it navigates a
document in Microsoft Word or any other compatible program. It reads
aloud tags on each element that identify whether it's a headline, say, or a
registration window, or an ad. As users move between elements using
keyboard commands, like the tab and arrow keys, audio prompts let them know
roughly where they are on the page, what it says there, and what their
choices
are. The reader also reads text aloud or converts it into Braille.
Jaws, said by many to have the best browsing ability, has improved
since Ms. Cooke first tried it. Newer features make it easier to navigate
familiar
sites and to register on others. But the overall surfing experience can
still be trying, as one must be well-versed in keyboard commands, and
almost no two sites can be navigated in exactly the same way.
While a handful of countries have enacted laws pushing for Web
accessibility, no law exists in the U.S. requiring private companies to
make their Web sites more accessible to blind visitors. Some have adopted
the
coding anyway under pressure from rights-advocacy groups. In Britain,
meanwhile, a law enacted in October that requires all U.K.-based
companies to make their Web sites accessible by screen readers is having
little
impact.
Help could come from the World Wide Web Consortium, a group backed by
some of the world's largest computer companies that encourages standardized
and improved Web programming language. The consortium is lobbying alongside
research institutes and other advocacy groups for a global standard of
accessibility coding -- an effort supported also by the European Union
Commission.
'Saddam's Beard'
Web accessibility is crucial for Mr. Roth's VTPlayer. While VirTouch
already offers a Windows-based, offline version for about $970, the Web
version
is still in development.
No special coding is required to render simple line drawings, like a
skeleton or a building plan, into a tactile surface on the VTPlayer's
panels. But more complex images, like the photo of Saddam, contain
different colors and shades. These require a special VirTouch code that
produces
the tactile outlines and embossments on the pin panels, as well as audio
prompts that identify areas within images, like, "This is Saddam's beard."
Obviously, it's not possible for one group to annotate even a small
fraction of the images found on the Internet. VirTouch's proposed solution
is to
host a collaborative Web site that would make its coding publicly available
and encourage others to help code more images for use with the VTPlayer.
Meanwhile, Mr. Roth reckons his company is about five months away from a
product that will help the visually impaired fully navigate the Web and
work with all Windows applications. Says Mr. Roth, "We are trying to see how
close we can come to the holy grail."
Ms. Knight is a reporter for Dow Jones Newswires in Brussels.
Write to Victoria Knight at
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