On tone deafness, but really on color blindness and blindness.
A while ago I was reading about this:
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That is a gadget that reads text in front of you and speaks it in your language, so the (near) blind) can read signs and labels.
I think this is the coolest thing I had seen in a long time. Now I was thinking advance this a bit, maybe use google glass? and put a label with the color next to any light source to help the color blind.
Copyright Jan Panteltje 2013 All Rights Reserved, donated into the public domain Fri Aug 16 07:54:11 CEST 2013 so you can no longer patent it Mr Google, Mr Apple, Mr Microsoft.
Keywords prior art, color blindness, google glass, send me the millions.
On a sunny day (Thu, 15 Aug 2013 23:17:02 -0700) it happened Don Y wrote in :
No, wait, there is a big difference, THIS thing
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is just goggles, and it plays the sound against the skull's bone, so only you hear it..
It is amazing how much smaller and lighter things have become.
As to the 'show a label next to light source' idea I have, this is SOOO easy to program, in fact I already have it in mcamip...:
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It can do any text anywhere in the screen area, it does YUV processing, just need to add some lines of code to slice the U, V, and Y and put the labels at the max Y position.... (brightest spot).
Also I think to make complicated flashing LED patterns on equipment to distinguish between colors for color blind, pesters normal users...
I am already pissed of with the beep beep beep from my MOBO if it happens, as I have no clue what the codes mean, well you can look it up I suppose. There is also the 'delay' problem with flashing LEDs, RED is an easy and fast way to show 'something wrong', if you have to count flashes, and pauses between flashes, for 10 seconds you maybe be too late..
Yes, maybe the idea is not new, but to implement it in google glass most certainly is, and I do not think you had a small enough color camera those days...
Such a light wearable unobstructive device would be really cool. I myself, well I am rather old now, when going to the supermarket need to put on glasses to be able to read the small print (could it be any smaller, I guess with nano-tech printing it could ;-) ) on the articles to see what is in it, not that it helps, as a list of 20 or more chemicals from coloring to preservatives does not tell me much more about the cookies than the picture on the box :-), but OK, when I get even older maybe I would need that reading thing.
Could be something for a kickstarter project... Go for it!
What is more frustrating is how the price has NOT fallen as far and as fast as it "should have".
E.g., the original KRM's ran on Nova minicomputers. IIRC, 48KW of "core" (yes, real core) -- 96KB that held all the code *and* data!
The Nova II, IIRC, ran at a bit *under* 1MHz. E.g., a load/store operation was more than a microsecond! The programmer had to maintain his own call stack, etc.
Said another way, you should be able to implement the original reading machine with a *PIC*!
Said yet another way, you should be able to implement it *in* a COTS desktop scanner -- with a speaker hanging off the back!
Or, in a low end smart phone "for the cost of some MIPS".
(and, for *those* sorts of prices!)
Granted, the original KRM had a low (audio) quality phoneme based speech synthesizer IN HARDWARE (Votrax). So, the quality of speech can (and was) obviously improved over the years (e.g., the Personal Reader essentially runs DECTalk/KlattTalk on a DSP).
But, you could still opt for a pure software solution on a general purpose MCU/SoC nowadays for a few dozen dollars -- *in* a nice pretty box!
With most assistive technology (AT) devices, "market pressures" don't seem to play a very big role. Governments tend to subsidize these things (blindness being a hot button issue in many cultures). This essentially sets a floor for the prices folks will charge for their products -- no incentive to sell for less than the gummit will give you on behalf of your consumer!
Markets are smaller so quantities are lower. Tooling charges can seem exorbitant when you're only building a few thousand units. (A blind colleague once complained that too many AT products "look blind" -- boring, unsexy, big, boxy, etc. -- no doubt because the manufacturers have opted to go with off-the-shelf packaging, etc.)
And, there tends to be more "support" required for their user base. you can't just say, "Download the latest update. Post your questions in our user's forum. Etc."
But, the most unfortunate aspect of this particular product (type) is the wow factor that it has with *sighted* users ("Wow! That's amazing!") and how *little* it actually does in a blind person's life!
Does it help you balance your checkbook? Does it tell you if you've left the kitchen light on as you retire? Does it help you get around town? Does it help you buy groceries? Does it help you select the clothes you'll wear today? Does it help you determine if the ice maker/water dispenser in the refrigerator door is currently set to dispense ice instead of dispensing water? Does it tell you if your neighbor's are home? Does it help you configure the washer/dryer for laundry?
Does it help you GET A JOB??! (#1 problem facing blind folks)
Don't get me wrong. The Reading Machine and it's ilk are wonderful technologies. You can't imagine what a "rush" it was to introduce a blind user to a Reading Machine and watch them struggle with the controls... then, CRINGE trying to understand that mechanical voice... until they would eventually (in short order!) realize that they *could* understand it and use it -- and see their eyes go wide as they started thinking of the possibilities that were now available to them: "I can read my *own* mail without my secretary!" "I can read the letters to the editor in Playboy" "I can read a *current* best seller instead of having to wait a year -- or more! -- for a Braille edition to be available" "I can read *today's* newspaper"
If you want to engage in a truly educational experience, tomorrow morning, *before* you get out of bed, keep your eyes closed and imagine how you would get through your normal routine KEEPING them closed! I.e., imagine *every* activity that you will undertake -- starting with figuring out what *time* it is, now!
What's the weather like? What will you wear? How will you pick those items out of the closet/drawers/etc.? Do you need a shave? Will you be able to do a thorough job without too many nicks? Is your hair combed properly? Are you late for your *ride* to work? etc.
Then, ask yourself how much being able to *read* would change your hypothetical lot in life! :-/ (*assume* the readers can handle the huge variety of layout variations you encounter in PRINTED text -- forget handwritten notes...)
On a sunny day (Fri, 16 Aug 2013 01:13:05 -0700) it happened Don Y wrote in :
Yes, that is a problem, that probably cannot be simulated by just walking around a morning with a blindfold... It brings you to medical research, where they have now implanted some electrodes in the brain to make a simple matrix (16 x 16 dots? and connected a camera to it, so a person could navigate. I have read if you do the same thing (matrix) on the skin of the arm, after some training the brain will take that as 'visual' input [1], Of course you can make bigger matrices.
One of my old neighbors had a lens replaced in his eye by an artificial one.. There is research with stem cells that seems to restore visions loss caused by some degeneration of the cones (I think, no expert on any of that) in mice... In fact there are daily reports of progress.
[1] Brain does not seem to care a lot where its gets its input from, logical for a neural net, some cells are specialized, part of specialized mechanisms though. But think of the rat brain cells flying a flight simulator....
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Not only was the rat blind in the sense of no eyes, and no ears, that little neural net could fly however.
As to voice synthesizing I did add speech output to my subtitle editor xste, using MBROLA
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Pretty decent sound, does not need a ton of resources...
Not "simulated". Rather, a "thought experiment". Just something to consider as you are starting your day.
I guess "a ton" is a subjective term! :>
MBROLA is a diphone synthesizer. So, the unit database is pretty big -- several megabytes, typically. "Per voice".
The synthesizer itself is O(100KB).
And, you still need a TTS front-end to drive it all.
When I think of "low resource usage", I'm thinking tens of KB for the whole TTS -- *including* synthesizer. E.g., the "backup" synthesizer that I've written is small enough to reside *in* a BT earpiece -- alongside the earpiece's nominal wireless functionality.
(So, the earpiece doesn't have to communicate with the user via a set of beeps and bops but, instead, can "speak" to the user: "Beginning pairing operation"; "Pairing timed out, unsuccessfully"; "Out of range"; "Low battery"; "Poor signal quality"; etc.)
On a sunny day (Fri, 16 Aug 2013 03:20:18 -0700) it happened Don Y wrote in :
Yes, subjectively speaking...
Yes OK, but a 'MB' these days is not much.
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512MB (byte not bit).
Bit of RAM, ARM core, will fit in a stamp size thing. At the low end, there is a PIC application that says: "Hi I am Mister Ed' ;-) I have that code somewhere, it reads from FLASH program memory (simple low sample rate). I also have a powerful audio amp in PIC:
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So I CAN make a PIC say a few words, more for larger memory..
Have you looked at what's inside a BT earpiece? *Selling* for ~$10?
I originally looked at just "playing back" canned messages (e.g., WAV's in essence). But, that severely limits you. It makes things like "Volume: 45%" tedious to generate. Yyou would have to store multiple messages and/or piece together messages to form larger ones -- instead of printf("Volume: %d%%", level) or equivalent.
More importantly, it makes it difficult to tailor the voice to the user's preferences, hearing abilities, etc.
E.g., a child might be happier listening to something that
*sounds* like a child. A boy happier listening to something that sounds like a boy. An older person something without all the higher order harmonics present. etc.
Hi Don, Welcome to my world! My wife actually BOUGHT a copy of Open Book (the Kurzweils were all out of our price range!) and the HP scanner to use it. She always wished it would really work, but she gave it only limited use.
We then bought her a new notebook so she could be portable and maybe get a job. Old scanner required special SCSI card (only drivers in Win95!) so we bought her a small Canon flat plate scanner. It came with an OCR package, of course, but we bought the latest version.
A week later returned the latest version. It was GUI only, no menus available to use it, but the one that came with the scanner had nice menus and worked just fine. She finally had her a reading machine!
Now, she never uses it. If it doesn't come online in a format accessible to her, it ain't worth bothering with!
Of course, our product is for the visually impaired - a talking color reader. Unfortunately for the OP, it provides its own light source, so doesn't read the color of LEDs. It was interesting getting it to the price point of under $100, and the interest it developed, because it was a 'luxury' item, and not covered by governmental entities.
That surgery implants a matrix on the retina, but relies on an external camera and power supply. Pretty much useless at the moment. The stem cells stuff looks interesting for Pamela's case, but is apparently in permanent 'research' mode. After all, if they actually cure the disease, then the grant money dries up!
Just your wife? Or, both of you? Any insights you would add re: "living with vision loss" that are "outliers" that I may not have considered (I've thought about this sort of thing for decades!)
When I was at KCP, the KRM's were ~$50K. Of course, HEW was our
*only* customer (actually, I think Stevie Wonder bought one but he's got deep pockets! :> )
It's now 30+ years later. Assume NO "feature creep". One would expect the equivalent software to run on a 10 year old PDA and be available for a $9.99 download! Certainly capable of running on a smartphone with many MIPS and MB!! :<
(THINK about how dog slow a Nova is by today's standards! The original PC-XT was faster and had more memory!)
I bought my Personal Reader at an auction at the local University. The "control unit" was sitting at one end of the room in one "lot" and the scanner and manual were across the room in another lot. I suspect I was teh only person there who had the faintest idea what they were *and* that they belonged together!
Cost me $7 for the control unit. And another $7 for the scanner.
Because people don't design with vision/hearing/physical impairments in mind! Idiots who rely on color. Or 100% visual interfaces. (try using your fancy iPhone with your eyes closed. Would you want to rely on Siri for *all* your interactions with technology???)
OTOH, there are folks who want to claim that designing inclusively "costs no more" than the noninclusive way most products are designed nowadays. I've pretty much convinced myself that this is wishful thinking on their part! :< (indeed, that was a big motivation for approaching my current project the way I did!)
And, "print" is far from standardized. Look at a page layout and try to tell me (without letting *me* see it) what it looks like. Then, flip to the next page and repeat the exercise.
The scanner in the original KRM was hand-built. Desktop scanners didn't exist back then (the PC hadn't even been born!). The mechanism had very distinct sounds as it moved, started/stopped, etc. In particular, a very high pitched "jingle" (imagine really microscopic sleigh bells) -- probably the linear bearings rattling as they first started to move?
It was common for the speech buffer to "run dry" and you would hear this jingle, repeatedly. Sighted, it was easy to see that the mechanism was making very small start/stop motions -- hence the repeated "jingle". Didn't take long to realize the machine was trying to "read a picture" :-/
[The Personal Reader has a handheld scanner option -- sort of like the optacon. So, you could *explore* a printed page instead of relying on the "page scanner" to do it for you]
You should also be able to disable the light source and use it as a "light detector"? E.g., "is the kitchen light on?"
Do you have a web page describing it?
No doubt you don't have a large staff to feed, etc. So, you can keep your overhead low. And, your costs, etc.
OTOH, you are selling a "toy" (in one sense of the word) to folks who probably don't have much by way of disposable income. Hence the "problem" with that market.
Out of curiosity, have you ever *systematically* gone through and catalogued the costs for all the "devices" she relies on? And, compared that to the similar costs for a sighted individual? Then, noted the restrictions that still exist on her lifestyle even after these costs?
[I'm sure you and she both know these things "in your gut"; I'm just wondering if you've ever tried to quantify them?]
We can take this off-list, if you'd prefer... though I try to educate people by letting them read over my shoulders -- without beating them with a stick or a piece of dried cod! :>
Hi Don, Just her, I see ok, just 20/1000 without glasses!
Lots of points there. I know several blind folks getting iPhones and iPads, because there is some software built in to them to allow speeck feedback through all the menus. Of course, you then have to first, afford the phone, and then, afford the services for it. At $30 a month, it adds up quick!
Ours does function as a light detector. In the algorithms, it first looks at ambient light. If there is a lot of ambient light (like I have aimed it at my desk lamp) it just says 'Light." If there is quite a bit of ambient, but not too much, I have it say 'Dark."
As for the devices she relies on, there are not a whole lot of them. Her talking watches cost about $20 each, of which she has two. Her talking calculator cost $70, but she bought it back in the '90s, and it still works. She has a taking thermometer that cost about $15, but she never uses it. We have two talking clock/thermometers that cost about $20 each. We have a grandmother clock that we put together that rings on the hour and chimes every 15 minutes (different chimes at :15, :30 and :45) and a Christmas clock that plays a short tune on the hour.
Her bid expense is the software for her computer, JAWS. It cost $900 new, and the license for support and upgrades is about $100 a year.
Yikes! I piss and moan when I can't read a street sign a block away (glasses required to drive -- not a strong Rx but astigmatism). And, lately, when I can't hold a component close enough to read the fine print without my eyes "crossing"! :<
[Really bright light makes the world of difference!]
And, you have to be located where that "speech" isn't going to be viewed as a disturbance. Folks might not be so keen on hearing your phone talk to you in a darkened movie theater! :>
I don't like "services". It's like *renting* toilet paper. An ongoing cost -- that you have NO control over!
(I pity folks who are embracing The Cloud... having to *rent* your own data, perpetually -- and, never having complete control over it!)
Ah, OK. Good. What about colors? Just primaries? Or, "man colors"? (men seem happy knowing the names of half a dozen colors; women have five names for *white*!!)
I assume it's a relatively narrow field of view so dragging it across a tartan plaid would have it scrambling to say, "Red. No, green! No, red again. Wait, was that *white*? Or, maybe yellow???"
How does it handle "history"? E.g., "run a tape"? I.e., can she look back on what she's previously "done" with it to verify calculations, keep track of what she's already entered when totaling a long list of items, etc.?
Meaning an *oral* thermometer?
Meaning "indoor/outdoor temperature"?
OK, so you've cheated and approached those as sight-independant uses...
What's the nature of those upgrades? Fixing bugs? Adding features? Or, just chasing MS's neverending idea of what's "right" for this week? E.g., if she stuck with one OS, would she need upgrades? Or, is it time-locked to force you to upgrade?
Bedside clock? Appointment calendar? Slate? Brailler? etc. Other "sighted" things she has just *memorized* (i.e., this button makes the TV louder; turn on the stereo by pushing the button in the upper left corner; etc.)
Ok, pretty much 'man' colors, then. Primaries, light and dark of each, brown/beige, gray, black white. We tried to make it useful, and not confusing. There are iPhone apps to do color identification, with millions of colors. What is "outer space', some shade of black???
Yes, oral thermoment, also a meat thermometer that I use more than she does. One indoor/outdoor temperature, but the outdoor sensor lead got 'pinched' in the window and doesn't work anymore!.
The JAWS upgrades are both to add features (occasionally) and try and keep up with the latest insanity from MS. No time lock, so if she lapses in support, it will still work.
Bedside clock? She uses her watches. Calendar? The calculator has a calendar feature, and if she needed it, she could use Outlook Calendar. Brailler? She has a Perkins (around here somewhere...) and a slate, but doesn't use Braille much. She likes remotes, as she can easily memorize which button does what, but now the DVR and Blu-ray both have on-screen menus with no accessibility. If she wants to see something, I have to come in and start it for her.
Her big thing is Excel. She does all our books in it, keeps notes and lists, etc. She also does Word for that sort of thing as well.
"Dark Black" (not to be confused with *light* black! :-/ )
When I was a kid, I was told my hair was "dark brown". It never occurred to me that there were "different browns"!
Your web site shows 40 colors. I probably can't name that many :>
So, she could decided to hitch her cart to "Win7" (or "WinWhatever") and avoid some of the upgrades?
No need for a talking alarm? Or, does she just *remember* what the alarm was set at, the night before?
I meant to keep track of appointments -- doctor, luncheons, etc.
Understood. I suspect Braille is on its way out, to a large extent. Given talking books/CD's, etc. and online media sources, I imagine younger folks will just rely on those avenues.
Perhaps a talking note taker? (I use one when walking and wanting to leave notes for myself without pen and paper)
Understood. I encounter a lot of home kit that has few, if any, buttons on it. Everything is on some fancy remote -- often with multifunction buttons, etc. Hard to use *with* vision!
So, screen reader is a win, then. Esp for excel where she can easily keep track of where she is "on the grid". Presumably, there are tricks that let her navigate around the spreadsheet and yet quickly access the field where you type in the contents/equation for that cell?
Appointments - she just remembers them. Notes? I forgot she has an old microcassette recorder she got for classes that she can take quick notes on. Also has a pen with a little digital recorder she uses occasionally.
On a sunny day (Fri, 16 Aug 2013 12:39:29 -0700) it happened Don Y wrote in :
I think the point with large scale integration is that silicon is cheap. Not that they sell it cheap.... I dunno what is exactly in a BT earpiece, but modern hearing aids have quite a bit electronics and are really small. Bush had one with a build in receiver to fore-tell him when asked questions on subjects he had no clue about, probably a team on the other side, so small, invisible in the ear-canal. But.. probably expensive too. I have one of those bluetooth earclips for my cellular phone. Receiver transmitter rechargeable battery, and button to take a call.
Right, I agree with that, MBROLA can do that, I am sure given the $$$$ I could integrate it in a bluetooth headset. But there is no need in that case, the computer box can be elsewhere, say in your pocket. You could recognize and classify the speaker on the other side as 'child' 'man' or 'women'. There is software on the market that recognizes your emotional state too. You could use that to select a response too :-) In what way depends on how you view or value the customer relations LOL.
But that's the point! What does the device do when there is NO "smarter box" to do all the talking?
You get a new earpiece. How do you pair it with the box? How does it tell you that it is paired? That it couldn't find the other box? etc. You're stuck with the sort of lame user interface common with these devices, *now*: press button, watch for leds to flash (what if you are blind?), execute pairing command on other end of link, wait for lights to blink twice and extinguish to tell you the device is paired...
What happens (after paired) when the earpiece can't find the other device? Powered off, out of range, dead batteries, mispaired ("sorry, this earpiece is currently paired with the *other* device that belongs to your wife... you just mistook hers for yours!"), etc. How do you know other than getting NO RESPONSE from the earpiece?
Granted, device is too small for a "display" (other than cryptic LED blink sequences). *But*, it has a way of communicating with the user -- sound! It just needs the *smarts* to know how to speak and what to say! It already has the *horsepower*... it just needs the *algorithms*!
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