(Rod Sterling's Voice) "..... This is the dimension of imagination. It is the area which we call....The Twilight Zone" (Spooky music)
In an apartment, a DB person is watching TV via her "CaptionBrailler", finds out the weather will be sunny all day. She collects her "CommuniBraille" and her computerized white cane and heads out on her errands. The white cane feeds her information about her surroundings via a touchpad on her belt, "Amy's Bodega is on your right" the touchpad spells out in Braille. She slowly taps her way down the street until the touchpad informs her "Post Office across the street on your left". She stops at the crosswalk and feels the crosswalk button until it vibrates, signaling that it's safe to cross. She crosses and enters the post office. Making her way to the counter she takes out her CommuniBraille" and types in "May I have 2 stamps please?" The CommuniBraille voices her request and the postmaster slips 2 stamps into her hand.
Meanwhile across town another DB person who has some sight enters the grocery store. He's wearing computerized sunglasses and is carrying his handheld "ASLContact". He searches the aisle signs which the sunglasses magnify 4 times, he finds the canned goods aisle and walks down. An employee approaches him and talks to him. He notices her and holds up his ASLContact to her. A small sign on the front requests her to speak into the microphone. She asks again "Do you need help?" The ASLContact's screen lights up and a computerized figure signs in ASL. He types in "I'm looking for Chicken Soup" and a voice speaks his request.
Alright, alright, (clicking TV off) now that was farfetched eh? Is any of this possible?
Some of it actually is getting close to reality. Let's go over the scenarios:
"CaptionBrailler" - There seems to be 2 products available called the "Braille TeleCaption System" and the "Closed Caption/Braille Computer System (CCBCS)". Notice I said "seems", these products are listed on www.deafblind.com 's listing of equipment available. But further research turns up nothing on the internet.
"CommuniBraille" - There is a product that allows communication via "instant messaging". It's called the FaceToFace by Freedom Scientific (www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/facetoface-product-page.asp). It's a pocket PC with Bluetooth technology that allows the DB to have conversations wirelessly with anyone they need to. The DB types on their Braille keyboard and the other person types on a keyboard on another handheld PC (included). But can it convert Braille to Voice like I imagined? No, not yet.
"Computerized White Cane" - Is this available? No it's not (but would be kewl). But there is a white cane that uses sonar (like bats) that alerts the user via vibrations. This would alert the user of objects either overhead or in front of them.
"Vibrating CrossWalk" - Yes this product is available! More and more "Audible Crosswalks" are popping up across the US and Canada which alert the "Hearing Blind" to cross by loud beeps. Sadly though there are very few tactile vibrating crosswalks.
"Computerized Sunglasses" - There is such a product called "Bioptic telescope glasses". This product is made by Ocutech (www.ocutech.com), and are glasses or sunglasses which have a miniature telescope on top. These can magnify your vision up to 4 times.
"ASL Contact" - There are products for the computer that can translate spoken English into ASL. The limit is that the "speaker" has to program their voice into the program and then the computer can recognize the speech from that user only. It cannot be "taken anywhere" and recognize any speaker. Are we getting closer with this technology? I believe so. There are many "spoken" operated products available (such as 'Sync), so we're getting closer and closer to this being available.
Now why don't more DeafBlind have these products in their arsenal? The biggest reason is $$$. The sonic cane I mentioned runs about $700 bucks! Some day in the future things will get smaller and cheaper; hey, our home computers used to be big clunky things that ran into the thousands of dollars.
Now a little "disclaimer" - The twilight zone story told here is totally fiction made up inside my warped imagination. So don't be emailing me about "I never saw that episode!" (wink)
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Those are awesome descriptions - I would love to see some of that technology in a action. For some reason, I have always been interested in assistive technology, and using it to "equalize" people abilities.
On the crosswalks - in the UK they used to have crossings that bleeped, with raised dots on the pavement so blind people could feel where to cross and hear when to cross. A few years ago I started noticing that these crossings no longer beeped. This seems very daft to me, and also irritates me as I have mental health problems which mean I zone out frequently, missing my opportunity to cross or starting to cross just as the lights turn red and nearly getting run over. And I can see and hear - how much more dangerous this situation could be for a deaf, blind or deafblind person, especially at the speed some people seem to feel it is necessary to drive even in a city centre.
In Staffordshire I have recently noticed that on some of the crossings, under the box with the button you press to activate the crossing, there is a little knob that juts out of the bottom and rotates when it is your turn to cross. I hope they plan to implement these across the UK.
It's amusing to consider the fact that some of these impossible technology things do, in fact, exist- as much as they may sound like sciencefiction.
(just as a reference, I'm severely/profoundly Deaf and legally (but not completely) blind.)
I own the ocutech autofocusing bioptic. at 4x, it doesn't give me enough useful information to be able to say, read street signs, but it does help me gain more general understanding of the environment (ie, knowing that the pole with the street sign exists at all, before hitting it with my cane) for people with better vision (I've seen someone with 20/600something successfully use bioptics) these really are a lifesaver for anything from reading books to street signs, and for those fortunate to camp between 20/70 and 20/200, driving.
In regards to crossing streets, there may not be a built-in tactile allerting system, but a method that works for me is a miniguide-type device, which is like a sonar-cane.. without the cane. When aimed at moving traffic, the pattern will be vibrate/stop/vibrate/stop. When aimed at stopped traffic, the pattern will be completely vibrate/vibrate. But I prefer a plain old white cane, I'm not comfortable with those "sonar" canes that only work in -most- conditions. They'll work as a plain-old cane if the sonar function craps out, but I fear first that the user might be too in experienced with the cane as a lone stick without the additional feedback, and more importantly, that the lengths they sell the cane at are seriously way too short. At hardly 5'1, I use a cane an inch shy of their "longest" height.
In regards to facetoface, it includes a PDA in which the sighted person can read off of, but if you're a deafblind person working with a hearing blind person who doesn't use a pacmate (pretty unlikely, in my experience, they're everywhere) you could just turn on speech in jaws, using a text editor and "read type words" in terms of keystroke verbosity. It's not perfect- but it will work.
For TVs, I haven't seen any such braille captioning system, but a simple work-around for shows in reruns is to check tvguide for the episode being played that day, and then downloading the captions onto a computer with braille or magnification, and playing it along with the show. It's hard to perfectly sync, but it works in a pinch.
I do think that one day, far more than this will be possible, but much of it can be here right now today if deafblind people are willing to work and tweak the devices we DO have access to.
Post a Comment