For Blind

Last week I saw an article about few college students doing a project on designing a special computer keyboard for blind. It was mentioned that it allows the users to type 40 words per minute. My basic doubt is why a specially designed keyboard is required for blind and why can’t they use a normal keyboard to type 40 words per minute. For them using a computer should be more like interacting with humans than just working with a machine. This made me ponder on how the visually impaired people use the computer.

I did googling and found that there are many devices to help the blind to use computers. Few of them are given below.

Braille Displays: An electronic braille display is a tactile device that is placed under a conventional computer keyboard, or laptop keyboard and enables the user to read the contents of the computer screen by touch in braille. Each cell has eight pins made of metal or nylon, which are electronically controlled to move up and down, to display a braille version of characters that appear on the computer screen.

Screen Reader Software: A screen reading program sends screen text displayed on the screen to be spoken by a speech synthesizer. Common features include the ability to speak the full screen, a user defined area of the screen, a line, a word, individual letters or the phonetic equivalent of a letter and punctuation. A screen reader allows menus, dialog boxes, tool tips and system messages to be read back.

Braille embosser or braille printer: Embossers print braille output from a computer by punching dots onto paper. They connect to the computer in the same way as text printers and can also be connected to notetakers and other devices with a serial or parallel port. Used in conjunction with the embosser is braille translation software that translates printed text into braille.

Voice Recognition Software: Voice Recognition Software enables the user to have an alternative to typing text into a computer. This is where the user talks to the computer and the computer talks to user (interactive software).

I think the voice recognition software should be the best solution for any work which involves typing. It might become a really difficult task to correct the mistakes committed while typing and a person might also doesn’t know in case of errors.

There are many other devices like these and quite a lot of research is being done on this front to enable easy usage of computers for blind.

When I was thinking about the latest technological developments and their usage for everyone, the first thing which struck my mind was iphone. Is iphone user friendly for blind? I googled again and found this interesting link “Does the iPhone shaft the blind?”. You should read the comments for the posting and look the beatings the author took from iphone fans :) . I don’t want that to happen for me. So let’s leave iphone aside.

Considering the population in India and the number of visually impaired people in India, can they use everything like what the normal people like you and I use. A simple task of withdrawing money from ATM should be a Herculean task for the blind. I still doubt if any blind person had ever visited an ATM. Does it have voice interactive software for easy access? Likewise I can think about many day to day needs and don’t find anything which is easily accessible for visually or physically challenged persons. Not sure when we start thinking about these simple things?