As someone who used to exclusively write software for the visually impaired at Ai Squared (I wrote a huge portion of http://sitecues.com during my time there), I wanna thank Shalin for building this. There are VERY few developers (in fact, non-developers, too) out there who understand the needs of that audience. We all take that stuff for granted, but to a blind person, this type of software means so much to them. I remember going to the CSUN Conference last year and meeting a bunch of amazing folks who were blind and seeing them use our software ... I was in a happy mood for weeks after that experience. Please continue building software like this. Please. Much respect, Shalin. You're awesome, man.
I'm happy there are developers out there that understand there are blind people out there who have a hard time using things we take for granted. This is a great approach to solving real problems that affect people. Kudos Shalin.
A personal opinion, these are the kind of ideas that should get backed by Venture Capitalists as compared to the "Yo" application.
1. Since you're targeting blind users, you may want to use a bit more ARIA on your page, particularly around the popup menu.
2. It would be nice if the main page explicitly stated that this was for IOS. I'm an Android user and had to explicitly click through to figure out it wasn't for me. IOS certainly has a larger share of blind users, but Android is popular as well.
Good luck! Any plans for an Android version? If so, and you'd like a tester who is also a developer familiar with its accessibility framework, please do let me know.
My initial impression of this app is that it's a cool demo of OCR technology, but I'm not sure how useful it would actually be to blind people. How would they know if they are taking a good enough picture of the text in the first place? How do they even hit the button? I could see using one of the hardware buttons as a shutter could work, but I don't know if you can do that in iOS.
(Note: I'm neither blind nor an iOS user so I do not know how blind users use iOS. Please correct me if I am wrong.)
Using apps is no problem (if devs don’t ignore accessibility). iOS comes with a screenreader (VoiceOver) and all the default apps are accessible. Here is a (somewhat boring) walkthrough of the Camera app using VoiceOver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVDojENUGw0
Basically, taping on the screen once will read to you what you just tapped, tapping twice (anywhere on the screen) will then select that. There are also gestures to navigate the different elements on the screen (mostly what you would expect, e.g. swiping forward/backward to got to the next/previous element)
I think Android has a similar screenreader by now (no idea how good it is) and I can only recommend playing around with it to get a feel for it.
I would assume taking good enough pictures is just a question of patience and practice. There is feedback (how much, if anything, was recognized?) so it’s possible to learn and get better at it.
When I first opened the site there the main graphic loaded really slowly. Its a 2.1 MB PNG; you may want to change it to JPEG since it'll be way smaller and look just the same (especially since its a photo to begin with).
Are there any blind users of your app? How does it compare to the existing technologies that blind people are using for reading? What do blind people think of it so far? How does it handle formatting, OCR errors, fast-forwarding, that kind of thing?
They're a non-profit that provides volunteer-read mp3s of text books and other popular reading materials. Last I checked, they received a government grant that let them give away memberships to blind/dyslexic students.
I used to read for them - knowing thousands of people have used the thousands of pages I read to learn is really satisfying.
As a dyslexic myself, I just wanted to point out (at least for those who don't know) that dyslexia manifests itself differently in many folks, so while this may be useful for some folks who are dyslexic, it isn't for all of us (like me, for example).
Why choose this over audio-books and advanced TTS software? As qrazhan noted, it's very difficult (unnecessarily so) to use in the first place. (ie. electronics are already the way to go, why would you care about print versions vs. digital versions if you're blind? they all sound the same).
I wonder, is this something you yourself use? Are you blind? In which case, I'm sure you're aware that this is not how assistive software works. Sorry, I just don't get it.
Not everything is available digitally--mail, for instance. Sure, given the choice, I'd choose an existing digital book over one I scan myself, but I can't for instance choose a digital version of the medical bills the hospital mails me.
That said, this isn't an entirely unique concept, and you're right, positioning the camera is challenging. There are tools to help with this--arms and stands that position devices at the correct height to photograph a standard-sized sheet of paper. It may strike you as entirely impractical, but I remember the days when scanners were huge and bulky things, and even now when they aren't, I don't necessarily have the desk space to keep one out, or the desire to hook it up and store it when not in use. A reliable camera-based OCR solution for my Android phone and an arm/paper guide calibrated to the S III would rock, and assuming reasonable material prices and standard markup (I.e. not the absolutely huge markups of AT) it'd be competitive with dedicated OCR solutions and hardware.
You're blind and a developer? As I noted in my comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8138937 ), I used to write software for awesome folks like you. I'd love to chat with you for a bit if you don't mind? What's your email?
What kind of hospital (or anyone who sells mail for that matter) doesn't use email? It's recognized as both safer and cheaper. Snail mail through USPS is pretty archaic.
Can you give an example of the TTS software you consider advanced? The software I tried works, but too often sounds robotic and far from natural. Especially for the Dutch language.
ClaroRead and Jaws are popular. We're talking about high priced software actually built for people with disabilities. Not using Balabolka to speed things up because someone is too lazy to read. (I do it all the time.)
Is this strictly for books? Because audiobooks are a fairly well established way for the blind to read those. Does this work in any way with periodicals, webpages, and newspapers? They often have unpredictable layouts. Letting a blind person read the front page of the New York Times print edition would be a pretty great accomplishment.
- Jonathan