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Below are two articles I got this week:
TECHNOLOGY :  A Device to Help the Blind Read

DALLAS, Texas (AP) -- A whole new world opened up for Tommy Craig as he tested a 
new handheld device for the blind that converts print to audio. Craig was

able to "read" everything from menus to cooking directions by positioning the 
reader over print and taking a picture. In seconds, the device's synthetic

voice read the printed message to him.

"The reader provides access to materials that a lot of times you just didn't 
read," said Craig, 51, of Austin, Texas, who was one of about 500 blind people

who tested the device over the past few months. "It certainly makes you more 
independent."

The National Federation of the Blind plans to put the device on sale Saturday, 
when its annual meeting gets under way in Dallas.

<snip>

The federation expects that the reader, which costs about $3,500, will be a big 
hit among the 3,000 participants at the annual meeting. It will be sold

though Massachusetts-based Kurzweil Education Systems Inc. and will be available 
on the Internet and in stores.

People who have tested the reader said they enjoy being able to read text they 
couldn't before.

More at:

<

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/ptech/06/27/blind.reader.ap/index.html>Light at 
the tunnel's end

In a future where being blind won't mean a person can't see, a sunset may sound 
quite beautiful, and a joystick could be more than just a toy.

by Mary Beckman, Special to The Times

July 3, 2006



ELIZABETH GOLDRING, a poet and artist, is nearly blind. Now, after years of hard 
work, she can view words and faces and wander through a virtual art gallery

of her work. An instrument called a "seeing machine," under development at the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she works, is making the point

that just because a person is blind doesn't necessarily mean she can't see.



The MIT machine, which takes advantage of what's left of a person's retina, is 
only one such seeing device for the blind under development. Other technologies

use sound to represent visual information or to otherwise guide blind 
individuals - an approach that makes sense with research revealing that sound 
can

be processed by brain regions that normally process vision.



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The MIT device was developed after Goldring made a discovery at her 
ophthalmologist's 20 years ago. (At the time, she was blind, though now through 
surgeries

she can see a bit out of one eye.) That long-ago day, her doctor used a device 
called a "scanning laser ophthalmoscope" to shine the word "sun" through

her blood-filled eyeball and onto her retina. Because it was so bright, she 
could see it - and read it.



The experience sent Goldring on a search for a lower-cost alternative that would 
allow her to see at least something - and to Robert Webb, a physicist at

Schepens Eye Research Institute in Boston and inventor of the scanning laser 
ophthalmoscope.



To make a lower-cost machine, Webb and co-workers started with parts from an old 
video projector and substituted light-emitting diodes for the projector's

bulbs. LEDs are less expensive than lasers and can project images and words onto 
the retina just as well. Then they devised a version to test in the lab:

a computer that supplied, to a projector, either images of words or a virtual 
building to navigate through.



Sitting at a table, the user peers into the projector's light source, and moves 
through the images using a joystick. To find part of the retina that still

senses light, a user moves his or her head around until something can be seen.



Webb's team tested the machine on 10 people who were nearly blind - and reported 
in the February issue of the journal Optometry that all of the subjects

could see and identify most of the images and words. Seven of the 10 thought 
that navigating through a virtual world with the machine would help them 
navigate

in real life.



Webb also hooked up a camera to the projector and captured the image of one of 
Goldring's friends, which she termed "incredible." "I could see the expression

in his eyes, his mouth," she says. Without the machine, "even with my good eye, 
I couldn't see that."



The team needs more funding to get the machine out of the lab and into the hands 
of people who could use it. There could be a lot of them, says co-developer

Jerry Cavallerano, an optometrist at Harvard's Beetham Eye Institute in Boston. 
Many diseases that cause blindness spare part of the retina, which is needed

for this machine to help.



But seeing doesn't have to involve light. Sound can also convey information 
about the visual world. Some developers have been working on technologies that

rely on echoes to guide people through streets and hallways.



For example, the white mobility canes that some blind people use can be 
outfitted with a sonar device that projects high-pitched sounds. The quality of

the sound that bounces back indicates where objects are, and how big or solid 
they are.



But this kind of echolocation device gives information only about the location 
of objects, and some details of an object's characteristics - how hard, soft,

skinny or tall it is.



Physicist Peter Meijer, who works at Philips Research in Eindhoven, the 
Netherlands, is developing a gadget in his off time that helps blind people 
"visualize"

things such as photographs or images on computer screens. This would provide a 
different kind of information than echolocation, which if used to view a

computer could indicate merely the square shape of the monitor but not the 
images displayed upon the screen. Meijer's technology, called the vOICe, uses

sound to convey that graphical information - for instance, the shape of a wavy 
line curving across the monitor's screen.



The sound doesn't bounce back from the object. Rather, a camera - which can be 
hooked up to a pair of sunglasses that the user would wear - scans the image.

That visual information is converted via a computer into swooshes and high and 
low sounds that the wearer hears through earphones. For example, the pitch

of the sound relays the height of a square drawn on paper. And the brighter an 
object is, the louder the sound: A light-filled window would be heard as

louder than the wall around it.



Because the device takes a moment to scan, convert and relay the auditory 
information, Meijer says, "It could not reliably detect an oncoming car," but

people could use it while walking along the street to examine posters hanging on 
buildings, for example.



Users of the vOICe have to learn an alphabet of sounds that can be assembled 
into "soundscapes" that denote visual details, but when they become proficient,

longtime users can accurately describe a photograph of a street scene - trees on 
the left and a building on the upper right - based on the tones and beeps

and loudness of the sounds.



Meijer says the gear is not for "the faint of heart": It takes several months of 
training. But once people learn, their brains literally see the soundscapes.



To demonstrate this, neurologist Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone at Harvard University 
has scanned the brains of two masters of the vOICe system. When they're

given only the sound of a rooster crowing, the auditory parts of their brains 
light up during functional magnetic resonance imaging. But when they use

the vOICe to create a soundscape of a rooster image, the visual region in their 
brain lights up instead - even though they're actually hearing sounds.



"Once they learn the object's soundscape, they are seeing the object with their 
mind's eye," Pascual-Leone says.



Meijer says it's impossible for him to track how many people listen to the 
vOICe, but he thinks the training time discourages more widespread use. People

assemble their own systems and download the software that scans and translates 
visual information into soundscapes from his site. The biggest expense is

the cost of a laptop, which can run $2,500 for a "nice setup," Meijer says. The 
sunglasses that contain the camera can cost about $500.



Goldring, meanwhile, hopes she can find the funds to make the MIT seeing machine 
portable and more available. And soon. Devices to help the visually challenged

see can be a boon to their well-being, she says. "The technology is there so 
people who are blind do not need to be isolated from experiences. Seeing,

when blind, is like reading a poem. It can be quite beautiful."



*



(INFOBOX BELOW)



GPS devices offer a voice in the darkness



Although many visually impaired people use canes outfitted with echolocation 
devices, this isn't the only way to use sound to help navigate, or even the

most practical, says Jay Leventhal, editor for the bimonthly magazine Access 
World, which covers assistive technologies for the blind and visually impaired.

"Echolocation hasn't caught on - people have problems with putting something in 
their ears," he says. Instead, devices that use global positioning system

(GPS) technology to map out routes plus points of interest such as restaurants 
or subway stops - and relay that information to the visually impaired by

speaking to them through an earpiece - are gaining in popularity. But even GPS 
isn't perfect, Leventhal says: It has a 30-foot margin of error. "I'd like

it to be able to take you right to a door," he says.


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