Braille Live

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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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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Cooking Without Looking
Vision World Foundation is the parent company of Cooking Without Looking”.
“Cooking Without Looking” is the first TV show ever produced especially for blind/visually impaired people.

Three hosts, Celia Chacon, Tom Fox and Annette Watkins, are blind/visually impaired themselves, and moderate the 30-minute show which airs twice monthly on WXEL-TV42 PBS in Palm Beach, FL. The show will also air Wednesday evenings at 7:30 p.m “Cooking without Looking” is currently being prepared for national distribution on PBS.
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Major League Baseball Makes Effort To Make Websites Accessible
For immediate release
FANS WITH VISUAL IMPAIRMENTS GAIN ENHANCED ACCESS TO MLB.COM
NEW YORK, February 11, 2010 – Baseball fans with visual impairments will benefit from the implementation of functional improvements to MLB.com, the official Web site of Major League Baseball, and all 30 individual Club sites as a result of a joint collaboration between MLB Advanced Media, LP (MLBAM), the American Council of the Blind, Bay State Council of the Blind and California Council of the Blind. All three organizations applaud this fan initiative taken by MLBAM.
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Blind Man Sets World Speed Record
Blind man sets a World Speed Record at over 200 MPH in a Mercedes SL65 AMG Black Series
Posted on 10.7.2009 14:10 by Terence Keon
Ford recently touched a soft spot in us when they gave a blind man the opportunity to drive a 2010 Ford Mustang after 20 years of visual impairment. Now while that was a heartwarming story of an American automaker making dreams come true, this record setting top speed run is an inspiring tale for disabled people around the world. Mostly because of a blind man in a Black Series at over 200 MPH.
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Listening To Braille
January 3, 2010
Listening to Braille By RACHEL AVIV
AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading. She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic voice, and she listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The Financial Times to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the magazine. Read the rest of this entry »

A framework for making virtual worlds accessible to the visually impaired

Sapre, Manjari. Proquest Dissertations And Theses 2009.

Virtual Worlds have virtually exploded in popularity and have experienced significant commercial success. Read the rest of this entry »

A critique of need-blind admissions in higher education

Guziewicz, Meaghan Brown. Proquest Dissertations And Theses 2009.

Need-blind admissions, as described by the colleges and universities that subscribe to the practice, is a means of expanding opportunity for underrepresented students in higher education. According to these institutions, it is a great equalizer, providing all students even footing in the admissions process. Read the rest of this entry »

Blindness Organizations and Arizona State University

Resolve Litigation Over Kindle

Phoenix, Arizona (January 11, 2010): The National Federation of the Blind (NFB), the American Council of the Blind (ACB), and Arizona State University (ASU), today announced a settlement agreement resolving litigation filed by NFB and ACB against the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) and ASU. The lawsuit arose from the university’s participation in a pilot program using the Kindle DX, a dedicated device for reading electronic books, or e-books, developed by Amazon.com, Inc. The NFB and ACB alleged that the Kindle DX was inaccessible to blind students and thus violated federal law. ABOR and ASU denied and continue to deny any violations of the law.
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