Braille Live

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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Exploring Blindness, Questions Yet Unanswered

Exploring Blindness: Questions yet Unanswered
Michael Bullis BRAILLE MONITOR, Vol. 53, No. 3 March 2010

Michael Bullis is a certified orientation and mobility instructor and currently the executive director of the Maryland Technology Assistance Program. In the following article he raises questions and explores research options, discussion of which we usually find uncomfortable. He welcomes comments on these ideas at
bullis.michael@gmail.com
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NLS BARD and Download Project and Players Capable of Playing These Books
We are replacing our original effort on this page. There have been so many changes we decided it best to just start over.

Getting Started With The NLS
If you are not currently a reader of NLS books and want to start getting books here’s what you need to do. First contact your regional library and get signed up with them. They can arrange to provide you a machine that’s capable of downloading the books as well as playing books supplied by your regional library. Visit The NLS Find a Library page below to locate your regional library. Second visit the link below and fill out the application.
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