It's not the first time we're speaking here about blind people, computers and the online world. Check "Computer-drawing program allows blind to 'see'" or "Tate's Ultra-Modern Visual Access" for example.
Today, Elisa Batista is writing about a new personal digital assistant (PDA) developed by David Engebretson, a blind engineer, and Freedom Scientific Inc.
The "PAC Mate," a personal digital assistant that runs on Microsoft's Pocket PC operating system, sells for $2,595.
The PDA, which begins to ship later this year, comes with an eight-dot Braille keyboard or a QWERTY-style keyboard. The PDA lets users tap into all the Windows applications, including Word documents, Outlook e-mail and Internet Explorer.
The PAC Mate also comes with Freedom Scientific's popular "JAWS" software to read aloud any content brought up on the screen.
Here is a picture of the PAC Mate.
Don't you think it's a little bit pricey?
While the PAC Mate's price is comparable to other computers for the blind, even those machines are considered expensive in a community that claims higher unemployment than the general population, said Andrew Imparato, president and CEO of the American Association of People With Disabilities.
"The value (for the PAC Mate) will be mostly for blind folks who are working and can afford this," Imparato said.
Coincidentally, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) issued yesterday a press release about a prototype of a "tactile graphic display."
Mike Musgrove reports on this new development: "Blind May Get Look At Digital Pictures: Technology Lets Users 'See' by Touch".
The device, which has been in the works for more than a year, translates the images from a personal computer to a grid of 3,600 pins. The pins rise from their normal position into a copy of the image, and users can "read" that pattern with their fingertips.
At the heart of the prototype is a ten-year-old Hewlett-Packard "XY plotter" -- a printer-like appliance typically used by engineers to graph equations. Though the plotter was designed to produce its results as ink on paper, the NIST team has re-engineered the device. An inspiration for the invention was a "bed of nails" toy usually sold at novelty stores, in which a flexible grid of steel pins can take the shape of a hand or anything placed under it.
John Roberts, leader of the project at the NIST, estimated that the device could start at about $2,000 when it eventually debuts on the market. While the device now can be used to communicate large shapes to blind people, Roberts said he hopes to eventually tweak the product to enable the blind to effectively "see" digital pictures this way.
So, it seems that both of these tools designed to help blind people will sell for about the same price.
Sources: Elisa Batista, Wired News, October 24, 2002; Mike Musgrove, The Washington Post, October 25, 2002
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