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From:
Eric Oyen <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
For blind ham radio operators <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Fri, 27 Jun 2014 03:28:26 -0700
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well,
considering that most of the antenna analyzers contain 3 elements of concern to us, its relatively simple to design 1 or 2 accessibility solutions.

the first is a simple VCO (voltage controlled oscillator). This would be for use with the 2 meters on board (the reactance meter and the SWR meter)
the second would be a simple programmable voice chip/interface that would read from the frequency display input lines. Considering there would be 6 total digits and 3 decimal point locations, this makes the speech interface rather a lot simpler than what one has to do with a screen reader. If Braille cells didn't cost as much as they do, creating a tactile frequency display for the unit would be inexpensive. all you would need would be to translate a-j and the decimal point. that would be a 7 cell interface with only the absolute minimum of hard wired programming (in an Eprom). or, if the braille display idea is too complex, using the same Eprom and some low bit recorded voice and a BCD decoder (7 segment displays are Binary coded decimal where a display will have 12 possible states where 00000000 = off and and each segment pattern will have a specific value). I can compile a simple table displaying how this could be done using binary states if anyone wants it.

Since we are not concerned with accuracy lower than 1 Khz, this makes the idea of building a hardware speech interface pretty simple.

Now, some of the newer units have a USB interface, and a program to read that data from the device, with a little programming know-how, one could use jaws on windows or some other screen reader (voiceover on mac, orca or one of the dozen other open source screen readers on Linux).

there are several possible solutions here, some of them fairly cheap.

Ideas, suggestions, comments?

-eric

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