Create Affordable Systems for the Blind

It's a fact of life that there are millions of blind and visually-impaired people in the U.S. For system builders, this is an opportunity to not only offer your services as a Good Samaritan, but also to develop a new clientele.

But first, start with a simple exercise. Reach up and turn off your monitor. Now ask yourself, can you use your computer?

Welcome to the world of the blind. For them, the emphasis on graphical user interfaces (GUIs) is something of a bad joke—they're blind. About 1.3 million Americans are blind, and if you count all forms of restrictive visual impairment, the total rises to about 10 million people in the U.S. alone, according to the American Federation for the Blind.

While the accessibility industry offers a vast range of solutions, many are dishearteningly expensive. So in this Recipe, I'll examine some of the more inexpensive approaches that a system builder can take to serve blind and other visually impaired customers.

Windows XP's Built-in Resources

It's a little-known fact that three applications for the disabled are built into Windows XP: Narrator, Magnifier and On-Screen Keyboard. You'll find them by selecting Start > All Programs > Accessories > Accessibility.

Windows' Narrator program announces screen events and read text in Notepad and WordPad, in the control panel and desktop, and in a few other situations.

The On-Screen Keyboard lets you click screen keys with a mouse. Or you can "dwell" on a screen key and let the software notice it, or put the application in scan mode and click when the desired key is highlighted. This allows typing via a one-click joystick. It looks like this:

The Windows Magnifier adds an extra on-screen window that zooms in on the area around the mouse pointer or text-entry point.

All three apps have one thing in common: a disclaimer noting that they have a "minimal level of functionality." Nevertheless, these apps illustrate what can be done. By testing them, you'll better appreciate what fully-functional systems can do.

Moving Beyond Windows

Blind computer users consider the era of MS-DOS and CP/M as the good old days. That's because screen activity with those older operating systems was so straightforward: just line after line of unformatted text, which a screen reader could simply speak aloud. (A screen reader is software that narrates aloud whatever text is strolling on the screen, usually over a system's speakers.)

But with the advent of Microsoft Windows and other GUIs, the screen reader is confronted with an ever-changing landscape of windows and dialog boxes. It has to announce new windows; explain the presence of frames, tables, and hyperlinks; help the user navigate through the screen elements using keyboard commands; and incidentally read aloud any text it encounters along the way. In addition, the output can also be vectored to a Braille device so the user can read it through his or her fingers.

Screen readers are the foundation for blind computer use. Today, there are three main screen readers for Windows: Market-leader JAWS (Job Access With Speech) for Windows from Freedom Scientific, which retails for about $895; Window-Eyes from GW Micro, which costs $795; and HAL Screen Reader from the U.K. vendor Dolphin Computer Access, which goes for $800.

Configuring a reading system is an area where a consultant can add value. A blind person, equipped with the right software, can lay printed material on a scanner and have it read aloud by the software. Books and magazines become accessible, although jump-to-inside-page stories in newspapers are a source of annoyance—just as they are for the sighted!

Standalone systems can cost $3,000, including a PC, scanner, keypad controller, and extras like a system for recording audible file names. A serviceable system could obviously be configured less expensively, considering how cheap PCs and scanners have become.

The most popular text-reading software packages are OpenBook from Freedom Scientific, and Kurzweil 1000 from Kurzweil Educational Systems. OpenBook costs $995, has three different OCR engines, and will "skim" by reading only the first (or first and last) sentences of paragraphs, letting the user jump in where desired and begin full reading. For reading the text aloud, it has two different synthesizer algorithms: a natural-sounding one when reading for pleasure, and a droning one for use when editing. The Kurzweil 1000 also costs $995. It sports two OCR engines, two reading voices, a scanning optimizer, and editing and study tools aimed at students.