Products for the Visually Impaired

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Products for the Visually Impaired

Postby Spock » Wed 2005 Mar 02 1:40

ref: Braille inside the left side of the banner

I just spent the last hour making a post to possibly help someone in another forum and thought I would share the results here. The information I found is interesting and may be useful to someone here or that we know of. Post follows:

Seems to me I have heard of a braille reader for computers. It attaches as an external peripheral, similar to an external keypad, but has a smooth surface with holes that pins are pushed up through in a pattern depending on the letter being read. I will attempt to try to find some reference to such a device.

In the mean time, I will also post here any of the other references I find while searching for "braille + computer" ...

Woodlake Technologies - appears to be speech to voice conversion.

About Braille - An educational page about different types of braille.

International Braille Research Center - Fascinating information and additional research links.

Trynameks - This looks the most promising so far. There is a listing for braille displays, but, unfortunately, when I clicked on it, I got a message that the page was being updated.

Robotron - A braille palmtop device.

ScreenReader.co.uk - Various products available. Didn't get into it deep enough to verify whether they offer a braille reader, but it looked like they might.

Blindness Resource Center - This site has a lot of information and resource links. It is also the first one I've seen that had a "braille" link.

Sighted Electronics - FINALLY! Success. There are several braille readers available here. They've come a long way from the (obviously prototype) one I saw which only displayed single letters.

Hope this helps.

[Added]
I continued looking and found the following that may be of some interest:

BrailleNote - A standalone braille "keyboard" thay may also be used to interface with a standard computer.

SensoryTools - Offers several touch sensitive devices, including a talking compass!

Louis Braille - A short history of how Braille notation came to be.

FreedomScientific - More products offered for vision impaired users.

BRL, Inc. - More products for visually impaired. I thought their domain name was rather catchy, WYFIWYG = What You Feel Is What You (Get?)

Emma wrote:As far as I know, a lot of VI users prefer audio software, rather than Braillers - not sure why.

There is a pretty comprehensive database of soft/ hardware at http://www.techdis.ac.uk (follow links to accessibility database). Basically it's a database of soft/ hardware that could be of use to students in Further and Higher Education in the UK. It covers pretty much everything, but they don't do reviews as such - just information about it, so that the users and/ or Occupational Therapists etc can help decide what is best for an individual. It's got links to all the relevant companies though.

The use of the Internet for people with VI has an interesting history. When it was first developed - and people had pretty basic braillers/ voices that were very robotic, it did mean for the first time that VI users were more or less on a par with sighted users - rather than a library for example, where many books weren't suitable. As time has gone on, and Web designers utilised the visual aspects of the web, so VI users were getting left behind. Hopefully with things like Section 508 and the equivalent laws round the World, things will return to a level playing field.
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