Braille Live

Windows Phone 7
Mobile Speak for Windows Mobile, 5 years of successes and challenges
Code Factory products will not be compatible with the initial versions of Windows Phone 7
Terrassa (Barcelona), Spain, September, 1st, 2010
Code Factory has always shown a great commitment to keep up-to-date with the latest mobile phone technology. Back in 2005, Code Factory launched Mobile Speak Pocket. “Many of our users were asking us to make Windows Mobile Pocket PCs accessible, because at the time they were the only professional-oriented mobile devices,” explained Eduard Sánchez, Code Factory’s CEO. “One of our top priorities has always been to allow our profesionnal blind and visually impaired users to be as efficient and productive as their sighted peers. Therefore, based on the experience of Mobile Speak for Symbian phones released two years earlier, we put together all our passion, knowledge and effort and developed Mobile Speak for Windows Mobile”.
Read the rest of this entry »

Mobile Speak 4.5 for Symbian
Mobile Speak 4.5 for Symbian is Now Available
Touch Screen, Web Browser, Calendar, TweetS60, Nokia C5, C6, E5 & E73 Mode, and More!
Terrassa (Barcelona), Spain, July 1st, 2010
Read the rest of this entry »

National Federation of the Blind Announces
2010 Scholarship Program Winners

Baltimore, Maryland (May 12, 2010): The National Federation of the Blind (NFB), the nation’s oldest and largest organization of blind people, today announced the winners of its 2010 Scholarship Program, which awards thirty scholarships each year to recognize achievement by blind scholars. The winners are listed below in alphabetical order with their home states and vocational goals:
Read the rest of this entry »

Beware of Resurgence of Banking Virus
BBC NEWS Banking virus is back warns firm
Zeus, a virus that steals online banking details from infected computer users, is more powerful than ever, warns a web security company. Trusteer says it has spotted the Trojan virus in one of every 3,000 of the 5.5m computers it monitors in the US and UK.
Read the rest of this entry »

Braille Displays Promise To Deliver The Web To The Blind
North Carolina State University researchers take the first steps toward making an affordable and more dynamic Braille display By Larry Greenemeier Scientific American, April 5, 2010

The Web’s wealth of information would lose some of its luster if you read it only one line at a time. Yet this is exactly how blind and other vision-impaired people today must experience the Web when they use electronic Braille displays connected to their computers.
Read the rest of this entry »

40 Year Old Discovery Could Define Future of Computing
BBC NEWS
HP outlines memory of the future By Jonathan Fildes
Technology reporter, BBC News
The fundamental building blocks of all computing devices could be about to undergo a dramatic change that would allow faster, more efficient machines

Researchers at computer firm Hewlett Packard (HP) have shown off working devices built using memristors – often described as electronics’ missing link. These tiny devices were proposed 40 years ago but only fabricated in 2008. HP says it has now shown that they can be used to crunch data, meaning they could be used to build advanced chips.

That means they could begin to replace transistors – the tiny switches used to build today’s chips. And, crucially, the unique properties of memristors would allow future chips to both store and process data in the same device.
Read the rest of this entry »

Google Funds New Research To Help Blind Web Surfers
March 30, 2010
(PhysOrg.com) New research by University of Manchester scientists that could help blind people find their way around the World Wide Web has been given a boost with a £50,000 grant from Google.

Drs. Andy Brown, Caroline Jay and Simon Harper who are based at the University’s School of Computer Science, have already developed a prototype screen reader that has been successfully tested on blind web surfers in an independent evaluation.

The team used specialist eye tracking techniques to find out how sighted people interact with complex Web pages so they could translate the pages into audio. Now they are working with Google to make their technology, which is not yet suitable for general use, freely available to people with visual impairments.
Read the rest of this entry »

Verisign Rolls Out New Website Verification Service
VeriSign is introducing a certification service that confirms whether a business is legitimate and that their Web site is free of malware.
Read the rest of this entry »

BARD Site Delivers One Millionth Download
Digital Talking-Book Internet Service Delivers One Millionth Download
On Feb. 21, 2010, Tonia Gatton downloaded the digital talking-book version of “Charlotte’s Web” to her home computer. She knew she was going to read a classic of children’s literature. What she didn’t know was that she was also making history.
Read the rest of this entry »

Braille Struggles Under Threat From Audio Access Technology
by Alessandra Retico
They are letters you can touch: six little dots you brush with your fingers, 64 combinations to encode the world. But now Braille, the blind person’s Esperanto, is set to become a dead language. New technologies mean the tactile alphabet is being used less and less, as sound takes its place: technologies such as telephone services with synthetic voices to read newspapers; talking computers and audio-books. Many young blind people no longer learn the physical grammar that would allow them to communicate with any other user in any language, preferring to put on their headphones. These days, only 25% of Italian people who are blind (362,000) and 10% of blind Americans (1,300,000) know Braille (compared with a figure in the US of more than half of all blind children in the 1950s,
Read the rest of this entry »