Cam Sight

Low Vision Exhibition

Becky Cawdry — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:30:15 +0000

On Tuesday 10th August 2010 between 10am and 4pm will be a low vision exhibition for individuals and professionals to be held in the Methodist Church Hall Green End Road, Cambridge

Various exhibitors will be getting together to provide an exhibition for visually impaired people, carers and professionals. With various exhibitors in one large hall will give people the opportunity to visit various stalls and companies to get information and advice. From low vision aids such as hand held magnifiers to speaking software for computers and much more will be available for demonstration.

For further details of this exhibition please contact Gail Blackwell by phone on 01223 420033 or email gail@camsight.org.uk

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

Jerry Gilbert — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:47:27 +0000

We spent the last morning of the conference looking around the exhibition halls having a bit more of a chat with Larry Skutchan at the APH booth (stand in UK English!) and visiting Sendero, GW Micro (Window-Eyes screenreader and Braillesense notetaker family), BookShare (electronic text downloads for reading material) and Enabling Technologies (Braille embossers) amongst others.

At a little after noon a bit of a ripple went around the halls with the news that Stevie Wonder had arrived. Recently he has campaigned to encourage developers of mainstream technology to include accessibility features at concept thereby avoiding costly add on adaptations having to be made at a later stage. Stevie has attended the CSUN Conference in previous years and this time was here to look at products for himself. We didn’t actually get to speak to him but Gail got a photograph of him being shown some equipment. He took time out to chat and be photographed with a group of visually impaired high school kids much to their delight.

Using GPS for mobility (Sat Nav)

Jerry Gilbert — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:32:33 +0000

The last presentation we attended was again extremely interesting. Mike, Charles and Gerry from Sendero spoke about the various GPS aids that are available specifically for visually impaired people. Mike and Gerry have no vision and travel extensively using these systems. Charles is one of the software development team. Sendero have developed their software for popular notetaker products such as Packmate, Braillenote, Voicenote, Voicesense and Braillesense as well as for Windows Mobile-based Smartphones and Pocket PCs. They spoke about having introduced the GPS products to visually impaired children at first as a teaching tool to explore ideas of maps and cardinal direction. The early stage of this teaching often being carried out while travelling in a vehicle. Only when the pupil has a good understanding of these concepts would the system be used as an orientation and mobility tool.

Pistols at dawn

Jerry Gilbert — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:48:01 +0000

At around about dawn (UK time) we were treated to an exhilarating and novel experience when proponents of the major computer operating systems Windows, Apple Mac Leopard and Linux Open Solaris bravely engaged in a live ‘duel’ in front of an audience of gathered delegates. Tasks were set by adjudicator Jamal Masrui, blind technology guru and programmer, and individual ‘tekkies’, all blind, put their operating systems through their paces in turn with timed exercises designed to test performance with screenreaders. The ‘duellists’ were Raul Gallegos (Windows XP with Window-Eyes), Dean Hudson (Apple Mac Leopard with VoiceOver) and Mike Pedersen (Linux Open Solaris with ORCA).
Tasks set included opening an application such as a word processor, opening a web page and searching for a specific line of text, downloading a PDF file and opening it, searching the file for a particular sentence and copying it to the clipboard before creating and sending an email.
As with real life all three experienced computer glitches and difficulties much to the amusement of the assembled company.
Who won? The jury is still out. As the panel would be the first to point out ‘tekkies’ have the ability to make any system work for them; the Holy Grail quest is to develop systems that are user friendly for visually impaired people in general and we are not there yet.

It’s All Go

Jerry Gilbert — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:07:54 +0000

The sun shines in California as we attend the technology seminars here at the giant Los Angeles Airport Marriott hotel. At the Welcome Reception we learnt that representatives from 39 countries are attending the conference and it is not difficult to see why people travel from all over the world to be here. Mario from Brazil works in the poor areas of Sao Paulo is here on a shoestring and with David from the affluent Sonoma valley is looking for new technology for his classes with learning disabled people.

The hotel is bustling with visually impaired people with guide dogs and white canes. Everywhere is the chattering sound of accessible mobile phones, laptops with screen readers and Braille notetakers mingling with many different spoken languages. All the seminars are given in English so delegates with different mother tongues have to grapple with this on top of understanding the technological data.

Seminars start at 8:00am, our first being Breezing Through Using Technology to Teach Orientation presented by Cecilia Robinson. From Houston Texas, she manages a team of 3 O & M (Orientation and Mobility) instructors with responsibility for services for over 1600 visually impaired students across 7 counties in Texas alone.

Our next session was Orator for BlackBerry: Blind Access Solution for BlackBerry Smartphones. Up till now Blackberry devices have not been very accessible for people with low vision and not at all accessible for people with no vision. Humanware, Code Factory and Research In Motion (RIM) have come together to create a screen reader that will read out everything that a sighted person would see on the screen. Representatives from RIM and Humanware demonstrated a preview version of the new system.

It was a pleasure to meet Larry Skutchan from American Printing House For The Blind, the creator of Automatic Screen Access Program an early and highly effective screenreader for DOS. Larry is the inspiration behind the popular Blind Cool Tech podcast and is himself blind and a guide dog owner. He was speaking about a new portable Braille display called the Refreshabraille 18 and the latest improvements to the Braille Plus and Icon Mobile Managers which are internet enabled PDA’s (small personal data assistants).

In between the seminars we managed to fit in a visit to Ralph’s Grocery Store where a bewildering choice awaits you and cakes iced in every colour of the rainbow.

Arrived Safely

Jerry Gilbert — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:06:14 +0000

Safely arrived in LA with my Co-worker Gail after an only slightly turbulent BA flight from the new high-tech Terminal 5 at London Heathrow. The conference kicks off tonight with the Keynote speech from Anthony Coelho, the former US. Congressman from California who was the primary author and sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act.