Monday,
November 4, 2002
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Feature |
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Making visually impaired
‘see’
Scott R. Burnell
A
simple touch display for the visually impaired, to be tested by the
National Federation of the Blind, soon could provide access to
computer-generated images, federal researchers have said.
The device comes from
the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which also is well
along in the creation of a reader to turn electronic text into Braille
letters, said Sam Bodman, deputy secretary of commerce. The NFB has
helped refine the reader, which is ready for commercial licensing, he
told a news conference.
"We’re thrilled
to know the federation members will be providing field testing of the
(tactile display) technology," Bodman said.
"The collaboration
will help prepare this device (for) the homes, schools, and workplaces
of those who will greatly benefit from it."
The NFB wants visually
impaired people to be adventurous, said Marc Maurer, the group’s
president, but not everything is achievable at present.
"We who are blind,
if we get the right training, we can manage the words," Maurer
said. "If we don’t have the right devices, we don’t have the
pictures and we don’t have the information we need to be
competitive."
NIST has come up with
such a device, said John Roberts, a project leader in advanced display
technology systems at the agency.
The display relies on
the same principle found in the "bed of nails" item often
found in novelty stores, where an object pressed into the toy’s mass
of pins leaves a recognisable image, he told United Press International.
The prototype tactile
display is a set of 3,600 small pins, about 10 per inch, suspended over
an early 1990s-era plotting printer, which transports a pen both
vertically and horizontally to reach the desired position.
The display
"prints" an image by using an extendable pointer, much like a
ballpoint pen, to raise selected pins into a line drawing of the image.
"Current
technology for doing this involves (devices that change shape when
subjected to an electric current), and costs $ 40,000," Roberts
said. "The tactile display should cost about $ 2,000 initially and
probably come down from there."
Curtis Chong, NFB’s
director of technology, agreed the display should be much easier to mass
produce and therefore cheaper. A photocopy-like process also can produce
raised images, but at a cost of about $ 2 per sheet for specially
treated paper, he said.
"(The NIST display
is) a fundamental beginning that could result in something really
slick," Chong told UPI. "You can draw a logo or something in
real time and have it raised up so that a visually impaired person can
put their hand on it and say, ‘Oh, that’s what it looks like."
While a 10-dot-per-inch
printed image would provide little visual information, that level of
detail is about right for tactile images, said Chong, who is blind. He
easily recognised the display’s renderings of the outline of Texas,
and also quickly made out the stylised NIST logo.
Improving the
resolution to 20 or 30 dots per inch would provide better curves, Chong
said. Moving to the hundreds or thousands of dots per inch available in
current inkjet printers would only add subtle details, like shading,
that are meaningless for the blind, he said.
Development efforts
will focus on shrinking the overall size of the display while
maintaining its level of detail, Roberts said.
Blind engineers and
other professionals relying on mathematics are really interested in
being able to "see" graphs and other charts, he said.
The tactile display
also would provide dramatic benefits in education, an area where the gap
between written and graphics-based information is quite large, Chong
said.
"Everyone has learned
to see pictures based on some fairly intense learning curves that you
get when you’re a kid—how do you look at a two-dimensional flat
picture and know it (represents) a three-dimensional object? It’s not
automatic," Chong said. "How (does a blind person) touch a
two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional object and know
what it is? If we could get (blind) kids to feel stuff way more often,
every single day in school, maybe the graphical gap won’t be so
bad."
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