info-mac@uw-beaver.UUCP (10/12/84)
From: Farber <farber@udel-ee> We have several students at UD that are severely visually impaired and are in our EE grad program. I have showed them the mac and they see potential in it. Is there any experience out there in larger displays, reverse video etc that can help them. Dave
info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (10/15/84)
From: winkler@harvard.ARPA (Dan Winkler) We're working on a talking text editor for the visually impaired on the Mac. It's going to be a full screen editor, although it of course won't actually display anything on the screen. I know that sounds strange, but here's the idea: the screen will be divided like a spreadsheet into cells. There will be one *word* (not character) per cell. You will be able to drag the mouse over the cells and you will hear audio feedback (a beep or click) as you cross word boundaries and as you cross line boundaries. I think that if the cells are large enough, this feedback will give you a good idea of where you are on the screen. It will be like dragging a stick over a grid that you can't see. Clicking the mouse button will have the word in the cell under the mouse spoken. There will also have to be shortcuts, such as shift-click to speak an entire line. We expect to use MacTalk for the speech synthesis because Steve Jobs told us he would give it away, which means we could give the editor (and probably a companion terminal program) away. But there is also a very good speech synthesizer from First Byte called SmoothTalker. (They have a cute and freely distributable demo that may be archived on info-mac soon.) SmoothTalker actually seems to produce better speech, but it takes 3 times as much memory and will not be free. We don't think that large text is as good a solution as speech synthesis. For one thing, the person who motivated our project will be totally blind soon and large text will be useless to her. But even people who can see large text have to keep very close to the screen and move their heads several inches to read a single line. Braille is the other possibility, but it requires special (read "expensive") hardware.
info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (10/15/84)
From: Roy_Harvey%UMich-MTS.Mailnet@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA My mother is a teacher of the deaf/blind and a friend of mine (Dan Zuckerman, address = 2996@NJIT-EIES.MAILNET) did alot of work in that area of programming. Get in touch with him and tell I sent you - he may be able to help you out.