Software, Developed for the Blind
Monday January 10, 2000 2:03 AM ET 
By Carl Hartman,  Associated Press Writer 

WASHINGTON (AP) - Charlie Crawford's computer access to the Internet helps
him complete a couple of months' work in a couple of days. 

That would not be so unusual in today's high-tech environment, but Crawford
has been blind for 30 years. 

He is among 10,000 to 15,000 blind Americans who can read most of what
appears on the Internet using special software that takes electronic signals
that put print on a computer screen, and converts them to signals that
produce Braille, the system of raised dots for reading by touch. 

"I used to go into a music store and depend on someone else to read me the
new CD titles," said Crawford, who is executive director of the American
Council of the Blind. "That gave me maybe five or 10 titles to choose from.
Now I can get them all by myself. It makes the difference between a vacuum of
information and a plethora."  

"I don't need a car, so I can buy computer equipment," said Judith Dixon, a
Library of Congress official who deals with users of Braille and has herself
been blind since birth.  

Studies have found that fewer than half of all Americans have access to
computers, but more than three-quarters of the disabled do, Crawford said. 

"When a sighted person goes to the dentist or up in a plane, there's
something to read there. The blind have to carry their reading material
around, and if you can do that on a laptop ...," Ms. Dixon said, pondering
the possibilities.  

An embosser, costing $3,000 and up, impresses the six-dot patterns of the
Braille system onto a sheet of paper. Each set of six dots represents a
letter or a punctuation mark that the blind reader recognizes with his or her
fingertips. The embosser attaches to the computer, just as a printer does. 

Another device, a display system costing $5,000 or more, produces Braille
patterns using tiny metal pins. It's a small metal box that also attaches to
the computer terminal. 

"Mine fits under the keyboard - just for convenience," Ms. Dixon explained in
a recent interview. "It's attached to the terminal, not to the keyboard."  

The metal pins emerge only about one-fifth of an inch from the flat top of
the metal box, forming the six-dot patterns that the reader touches. The pins
form the patterns for 40 or 80 letters at a time - about five to 15 words
that move like a news crawl on television. 

"But they only move when I make them," Ms. Dixon noted. 

The reader of a Braille display system can follow the text but does not get a
permanent record. 

There are some problems. The increase of interest among the blind in using
the Internet was underlined in November by a lawsuit filed against America
Online Inc (NYSE:AOL - news)., the nation's largest Internet provider, by the
National Federation of the Blind. Curtis Chong, the federation's director of
technology, said the software needed to use AOL doesn't work with the
software required to translate computer signals into Braille. 

"The lawyers are talking," Chong said.

Nicholas Graham, an AOL spokesman, declined comment on the legal aspects of
the case but said the company is working on a special new interface for the
blind to be introduced this year. 

Crawford said many more blind people use the Internet with the help of
software that turns computer signals into speech. Only some can use Braille
easily - perhaps as few as one in 10, he estimated. The speech software also
is cheaper. 

Computer designers have devised many kinds of help for the disabled. An
"instant messaging" system, for example, enables the deaf to conduct rapid
conversations on computer screens.  

The Library of Congress has posted the texts of 2,850 books for Braille
readers since August, when a reader in Vienna, Austria, called up the first
book from its National Library Service for the Blind and Physically
Handicapped. Each user must sign up and get a password because of copyright
laws. 

Monthly magazines also are on the way. 

"We now have 526 users signed up - some of them are libraries - and we get in
a steady trickle of about 10 new ones a day," Ms. Dixon said.  

The Library of Congress began a "talking book" service for the blind in the
1930s on phonograph records, switching later to cassettes. Nearly 800,000
users have access to thousands of titles in 55 languages. International
standards are being negotiated for a digital system.  

By about 2005, the library hopes to have digital talking books available on a
piece of plastic the size of a credit card, said Michael Moodie, head of
research and development at the service for the blind and handicapped. They
would be played on a machine no bigger than a small portable radio, with no
moving parts.

http://www.acb.org/index.html
http://www.loc.gov/
http://www.loc.gov/nls/dtb.html
