- Computer programs for blind person portable#
- Computer programs for blind person Bluetooth#
- Computer programs for blind person tv#
Too often the developers forget to include accessibility features. Examples include self-help machines at some stores and banks. Technologies to assist people with disabilities “are fantastic and give deaf-blind people access to digital info and communication,” Bapin says. Deaf-blind people would like such a signal to let them know when a show resumes, he says.
When they hear or see that the show resumed, they can again pay attention. People with sight and hearing can take a break when a commercial comes on. “There needs to be a menu to allow me to select a channel or show that is captioned and also has audio/visual descriptions,” he points out.īapin also would like a way to skip an ad. And he says the new technology sounds like “a great development.”īapin does raise a few questions. Ángel García Crespo (right) chats with Javier, who is deaf-blind, through an interpreter (off screen) and a machine that presents words in Braille.Īnindya “Bapin” Bhattacharyya is a technology-development and training specialist at the Helen Keller National Center for Deaf-Blind Youths and Adults. It would let them communicate with anyone without the need to have a human assistant present. García Crespo’s team also wants to create a “universal communicator” for deaf-blind people. Testing with deaf-blind users should start in a few weeks. Apps for Google and Apple phones are just about ready, says Lourdes Fiallos. The Dicapta Foundation in Winter Springs, Fla., has been working with García Crespo’s team and others to make that happen. Indeed, it should soon be available in the United States.
Computer programs for blind person tv#
Teams need to tweak the decoding process to work with the TV signals used by broadcasters in different regions.
Computer programs for blind person Bluetooth#
The system will work with all types of refreshable braille displays, as long as there is a Bluetooth connection available.Ĭurrently, the system is only used in Europe. This lets a deaf-blind person “watch” TV as it is broadcast. “This is done in real time, in less than a second,” García Crespo says. It sends the data out to people’s refreshable braille displays on demand. “No one had done this before,” García Crespo notes. The system then combines the information and converts both into data for braille. That is what we do.”įirst, a computer program, or app, pulls out the subtitles and visual descriptions from the broadcast signal. But an electronic system can capture those waves. “Subtitles travel with the image and the audio in electromagnetic waves that we do not see. “Key to the system is the possibility of using subtitles to collect TV information,” García Crespo explains. The new system converts TV signals to data that a refreshable braille display can use.
Computer programs for blind person portable#
With such a portable device, someone who cannot see a screen can still read email or other information from a computer. Dots or pins rise up or drop down based on electronic information sent to the machine. A refreshable braille display is an electronic machine with a changeable braille display. The braille system uses patterns of raised dots to stand for letters and numbers. People who can’t see can also get and send information with a braille line, better known as a refreshable braille display. But it isn’t always “handy” to have someone else around. A deaf-blind person can get and give information through touch-based hand signals with another person. One way to get info is to have someone on hand - literally.
Getting technologies to work togetherĭeaf-blind people rely on their sense of touch to communicate. In other words, the deaf-blind people didn’t want to always need someone else to tell them what was going on. “We heard from them that they would like to know, without intermediaries, what is said in the TV newscasts,” García Crespo says. So they asked some deaf-blind people what would help. But the group wanted to help people with both challenges. The team had already worked on making audiovisual materials accessible to people with either vision or hearing disabilities. The idea for the system grew out of previous work by García Crespo’s group. The team went on to describe what they’d done in a paper, earlier this year. He unveiled the technology at a conference, last year, in Aveiro, Portugal. His group has invented a new way for deaf-blind people to “watch” TV. Ángel García Crespo is a computer engineer at Carlos III University of Madrid in Spain. Thousands more deaf-blind people live elsewhere around the world. By that center’s count, almost 10,000 of them are under age 22. Roughly 45,000 to 50,000 deaf-blind people live in the United States, according to the National Center on Deaf-Blindness in Monmouth, Ore.