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Ch.Srinivasu
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What is Information Technology?
Information Technology (IT) is playing a significant role in human life. IT has become a part of our lives (from daily needs to professional life).
Is it limited to any sector?
No, Technology is not limited to any particular area or indivdual. It is for everyone ( irrespective of one's abilities or disabilities). What is disability?
Disability is a limitation caused due to various situational or functional disorders.
Examples of Situational disabilities:
- People who forget glasses at home
- People who are driving cannot look at the screen and give commands
- Insufficient lighting
- Poor quality of screen resolution
- Using old technology
Functional disabilities:
- Low vision or complete loss of sight
- Hearing Impaired
- Learning disabled
- Motor disabilities
Technology for Visually Impaired
- Screen Reading Softwares:
Till late 1990s, it was a dream for people with visual impairment in India to have access to Computers and Information Technology. In 1995 midst, Freedom Scientific, a US Based company came up with a software called JAWS (Job Access With Speech( which convert normal computer to talking computer. It works effectively on Windows environment and user need not to have any special hardware and any modification in Computer.
What are the applications does JAWS Support?
JAWS enable visually challenged users to have access to each and every application on Windows platform. List of some applications are given below:
- Microsoft Office
- Word
- Excel
- Powerpoint
- Access
- Web browsers
- Internet Explorer
- Netscape Navigator
- Mozilla Fire fox
- Opera
- IBM Home Page reader (a stand alone sppech application for surfing net by IBM)
- E-mail clients
- Microsoft Outlook
- Outlook express
- Eudora
- Web designing
- HTML
- Microsoft Front page
- Dream weaver
- JSS, ASP etc
- Can have access to PDF documents
- Programming languages using
- Microsoft Visual Studio (includes Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual Foxpro)
- C & C++ using Tarbo C
- Java
- Microsft .Net
- C#
- Database Management
- Oracle
- SQL Server
- Accounting Packages such as Tally
- Chat clients like MSN, Yahoo, Skype, Google talk etc
Some of the above do not directly support with JAWS, but we can write scripts to use them. JAWS has an excellent feature to write our own scripts compatable with proprietary softwares.
Is Visually impaired only limited to Windows Platform?
No, we can use Linux using Blinux and Emack speak. Emack speak is dveloped by an Indian blind - Mr. T V Raman who works with Adobe Systems. He can be contacted at www.emackspeak.sf.net.
Apple's Mac OS also has built in speech interface to enable visually impaired to access.
How to Access print material?
As we all are aware, students with blindness depend on some one to read books for them. But do they get people when they want? or won't they hesitate to ask some one to read leisure books for them? There are numerous solutions for the same.
Kurzweil is a software to scan a book and read aloud automatically. In general, when we scan a book, it convert in image format, but this software has inbuilt OCR and thus convert to text format. Omni page is a similar OCR.
Robortran, an Australian company, designed a reading machine which can be connected to Computer and transfer scanner data. But its cost prohibits many not to use it. As you all know Braille is a script that helps a lot to visually impaired to read books by themselves. But converting large volumes manually using Braille slate or Brailler is time consuming. Thanks to technology since now using following hardware and softwares, one can produce large number of Braille books in less time and same work can be stored in Computer.
There are Braille embossers like Index 4 X 4, which can print 20 page s of 32 lines of each in one minute.To produce Braille books, there are softwares like WinBraille and Duxbury.
Useful links:
http://www.freedomscientific.com - JAWS and related products
http://www.duxburysys.com - For Braille embossers and related software
http://www.saksham.org - To get list of assistive technology
http://www.eyeway.org - have stories of amazing achievers.
http://www.w3.org/wai/ - A way to web accessibility
http://www.enableall.org - Have news on latest technology
My part 2 will deal with technology for people with low vision and deaf blind.
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