After my previous post about reading devices with displays, Peter Meijer of "voice learning edition" asked me to elaborate on the Smith-Kettlewell project to develop a system which would read displays on consumer products via an inexpensive web camera and a computer. It is not 'my" project, so I must be rather careful what I say, I will ask the project leader, Dr. Alan Yuille if he has further information for public release. It is the goal of this project to develop software to run on inexpensive "off the shelf" hardware to read things like appliances as automatically and interactively as possible. If the system works as planned, you would point the camera at the device about where you thought the display was, and the software would do all the work of finding the display, identifying important and changing features on it and "read" it to you. It is very likely that some training would be necessary whenever you tried a new device, but we have no idea yet how this training would be accomplished. It is our belief that only with this level of machine intelligence can a user interact with modern consumer electronics in a truly accessible way. Changes in the consumer electronics market lead us to believe that many appliances are going to become more and more inaccessible unless we have some stand alone solution such as this. One example is that you can not easily buy a modern oven which has a familiar thermostat of the type we have all learned to mark and adjust. Most modern stoves feature a dial that rotates infinitely in either direction and controls a digital temperature readout. Like so much of this visually overstimulated world, you have to see it to use it. Sorry that's all I can tell you for now, because the "AI" guys are still trying to make it work. Dr. Meijer's system depends on the user learning an entirely NEW CODE which attempts to relate audio sounds to the visual image. Just as with much previous work which is based on the belief that blind people can learn to "see" using non visual senses, this work demands that people learn entirely new ways of perceiving the world. Particularly with people who have never had sight, you must learn to understand images of which you have no built in conception using a language you don't know. The assertion that there is an intuitive relationship between audio pitch and space with vision is unsupported except in very very simple examples. We here at Smith-Kettlewell developed a successful audible oscilloscope which uses a simple version of just such audio representation, however our extensive experience with attempts to use this system with complex visual images does not lead us to believe that it will work. There is wide belief that the brain can learn to be "plastic" such that it can learn to "see" with portions of its self which were not intended for that purpose, and that the audio perception capabilities of blind people are somehow magical and can be trained to process unfamiliar complex images in an entirely new way. Despite much misunderstood rumor on this subject I have seen no actual scientific evidence to support this claim, and my personal experience does not support it either. I have listened to several images on Mr. Meijer's web site and find them entirely meaningless despite the fact that I use the Smith-Kettlewell oscilloscope regularly. It can be said in favor of Peter's work that it is certainly harmless, as long as you don't try crossing streets with it, and certainly inexpensive, so more power to him and those who are interested. You don't have to believe this, but my opinions are, I hope, not based in the "not invented here" syndrome, I make every attempt to be sure that I judge others inventions based on whether or not I think they will work, not on whether I wish I had invented them my self. After all if someone else builds something cool, then I don't have to do all that work my self. Remember this is one opinion, not to be taken as a representation of anything more than that, however it is based on nearly 20 years of experience in this job dealing with all kinds of access issues. Now, let's see a goodly number of blind folks make use of Peter's system and prove me wrong <G> Keeping in mind that you can almost always find one subject who can use almost anything, there isn't space here for the examples I could give which would make you all laugh. Tom Fowle Rehabilitation engineer,Embedded systems developer The Rehabilitation engineering research center Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute San Francisco [log in to unmask] VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List. To join or leave the list, send a message to [log in to unmask] In the body of the message, simply type "subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations. VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html