[SLUG] Last night's visit toThe Blind & Partially Sighted Society

[john at johnallsopp.co.uk]

Hi

Just while it's fresh in my mind I thought I'd write up last nights
meeting at The Blind & Partially Sighted Society
<http://www.scarboroughblindsociety.co.uk/> where Dave, Roy, Brian and
other volunteers clued us in to what life's like when you can't see
well. Our thanks go to them for their time and effort.

Total blindness, incidentally, affects very few .. 3 people in
Scarborough (3/60,000 = 0.005%). Most people can see something,
whether that's just light and dark, a spot of vision in an ocean of
blackness, fuzzy or 'dirty' vision, or vision on one side. David
thinks 1-2% of people are blind or partially sighted, overall.
Worldwide, from a computer systems developer's point of view, that's
significant, and of course, for each and every person it's very
significant.

Most members of the society are over 50 years old. Partly that's
because loss of vision is more likely with advancing age, particularly
macular degeneration
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macular_Degeneration> and diabetic led
degeneration
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetes#Long-term_complications>, but
also because there's more help available to younger people, so they
need less help from this charity.

Applications for this group of people, who may never have used a
computer before, include scanning in and reading out the printed page
(eg. utility bills) and using email to keep in touch with family
members.

Every member has different preferences, so each computer has to be set
up individually. David ran through some of the computer software they
use.

Jaws <http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_products/software_jaws.asp>
will read out the contents of a computer page in a rather robotic
voice and costs £680.

Zoomtext <http://www.aisquared.com/Products/ZoomText8/ZoomText8.htm>
magnifies a computer page, you can change the display colours and it
does text to speech recognition for £480. Because it provides access
to the whole computer, which younger people are more likely to be
familiar with, it tends to be more popular with that age group.
Supernova does it too
<http://www.dolphincomputeraccess.com/products/supernova.htm> for
around £1,000.

Comically, the Windows screen magnifier magnifies the screen but
through a rather small slit at the top of the screen. Big but also
very small. Well done.

Once you've magnified your computer screen, of course, most of it is
off-screen. Roy said something like: Firefox is absolutely brilliant
because it will magnify the text but it's all still on the screen, and
it doesn't magnify the pictures. It took me a while to realise he was
talking about increasing the text display size (which would then
re-format on the page). It's worth remembering that the very simplest
things we think everyone knows about may be of lifesaving importance
to people who aren't as familiar with technology, so we shouldn't
forget to mention what to us is obvious.

One other thing that this experience underlined for me was the
importance of brevity. A few minutes listening to a stilted, robotic
voice was enough to persuade me of the importance of getting to the
point.

Perhaps the most impressive software product was Guide from Software
Express <http://www.softwareexpress.co.uk/>. For £300 it will provide
a large, numbered interface to your computer and speak in a nice
female voice. It benefits from being English. My partner and I thought
this would be useful for older people who are unfamiliar with
computers regardless of their visual capability.

A piece of software called Touch Typing, originally from Birmingham
University but no longer supported, is used to teach people to type.

We may think that disabled people receive some form of help to
purchase this type of equipment. Apparently not. These costs are real.

One problem with all this is that most navigation is by hot
keys/keyboard shortcuts and it's a big problem to remember them all.
There's no consistency between packages, so a key for one thing in one
package might do something different in another, overwriting the
original setting.

Also teletext and ceefax keep being mentioned. They have the advantage
of being brief and to the point, but have declined with the advent of
the Internet to the point where there are fewer systems able to
support them. One user uses teletext, for instance, to check share
prices.

For interest, there are other non-computer aids. The Merlin Video
Magnifier <http://www.enhancedvision.com/merlin.php> costs £1,800 and
provides a video camera to screen which can be voice driven. Useful
for things like reading, crafts, painting nail varnish, etc.

A system (I didn't write down its name) that looks like a scanner on
its own will scan and read the page to you.

A magnifier that plugs into your tv costs around £150.

A Bierley <http://www.bierley.com/index.html> costs £99 for mono or
£200 for colour and works like a mouse, except what you roll the mouse
over gets magnified on your tv screen.

The EVS Max <http://www.enhancedvision.com/products.php> allows for
variable magnification up to 28x and some changes to how it's
presented on screen .. white text on black is preferred by most as it
doesn't glare as much. £312.

In computing HCI terms, actually yellow on black is the most popular
choice.

Max Port provides a pair of battery driven display spectacles to allow
reading while on the move, if you can afford the travel ticket after
spending £1,700 on this. The experience is rather like sitting in a
cinema with your text page displayed on the screen.

Flipper <http://www.enhancedvision.com/flipper.php> has a rotating
camera that works just as well pointing into the real world as it does
reading close-up text. It can record what it sees and magnifies to 30x
for £1,500.

The group plans an exhibition above the library on the 16th of May
where lots of manufacturers will display their wares.

Tuesday is computing day at the centre, but something happens every day.


Our next SLUG meeting 'should' be about setting up a Linux Kiosk which
I still think is an interesting thing but unless we have a 'client' I
doubt anyone would spend the time. It occurs to me that the sort of 
kiosk applications you see in the window of, for instance, the tourist
information office is not a long way off the number driven interface
that Guide offers .. a limited few options, lots of straw bales to
stop you running off the track. I still think there's something in
this, particularly if the main thing is to customise Firefox or
similar .. then customising a system for a user would be a simple
matter of designing a stylesheet for them.

Anyway, our next meeting will be dominated by our thoughts about
solutions for partially sighted and blind people. Steve plans to bring
along some software for demonstration. The meeting is on Wednesday 3rd
May upstairs at the Valley Bar, 7:30pm, just under two weeks from now.

J