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                            THE BLIND NEWS DIGEST

                                 Issue # 924

                          Wednesday, June 02, 1993

Today's Topics:


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                           Artificial retina chips
              Re: Is Windows alienating special-needs persons ?
                        Re: ASAP and Procomm Plus 2.0
                         Re: Newspapers on Internet
                            asap and procomm plus


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Subject: Artificial retina chips
From: pm@sun5.iaee.tuwien.ac.at (Peter Mayer)
Organization: Technical University of Vienna

Hi all,

our group is working on a study on vision substitution systems for
blind and vision impaired subjects. Can anyone please mail me the
addresses of people working on this matter?

Thank you.

--
Dipl.-Ing. Peter Mayer             fortec -  Rehabilitation Engineering Group
Institute for Electronics          University of Technology - Vienna, Austria
Email: pm@sun5.iaee.tuwien.ac.at                     phone:  +43 1 58801 3967




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Subject: Re: Is Windows alienating special-needs persons ?
From: CFBJ33@MGVAX.ULSTER.AC.UK (Eric Cameron)

I was interested in your posting not only because I am the blind
person referred to in the New Scientist article.

Up till now GUIs have only been accessible by blind people through
proprietry software developed by or in colaboration with the
suppliers of the operating system.  With the current generation of
GUIs the dialog between an application and the user interface has
to be intercepted, interpreted and represented in aural or tactile
form.  Speech adaptions exist for a growing number of GUIs e.g.
Outspoken for the Apple Macintosh, Windows Bridge for Ms-Windows
and Screen Reader/2 for OS/2.  Braille-based solutions are
beginning to appear e.g.  Humanware's system mentioned in a recent
posting (Index number 29263).  All these offer only partial
solutions using proprietry software which is continuly "playing
catch-up" with the technology.

All such adaptations require the creation and manipulation of some
kind of "Off-Screen Model". The development of a common off-screen
model for an object-based GUI would allow adaptive devices to talk
to a generic interface capable of multimedia and multimodal
extensions.  Software suppliers would then only have to create a
version written to such a generic standard.  Suppliers of
objectware and manufacturers of specialist devices could then
supply the adaptive capability required for various types of
special need.

The British Computer Association of the Blind (BCAB) are holding a
major one day seminar in Glasgow (Scotland) on Friday 5th June to
discuss "Present and Future access to computers for the visually
impaired".  Access to GUIs will be the major focus.  We would be
interested in information about similar organisation or events in
other countries.

Your suggestion of legislation to force suppliers to provide
command-line or message-passing interfaces is a step in the right
direction but more comprehensive and longer lasting solutions are
required.  For these the development of appropriate international
standards are essential.  Local legislation, such as ADA in the
USA, is helpful particularly when most of the major suppliers are
American-based and heavily dependant on government contracts.
Without appropriate standards however adaptive technology will
always be expensive to develop and provide and will always be
trying to catch-up with the latest developments.

As for multi-font documents the adoption of SGML and ODA should
facilitate rather than impair both the amount and quality of
material that can be made available to users of braille.  For
further information see the papers by Tom Wesley and Nick Ayres,
"Open Document Architecture - An opportunity for Information Access
for the Print Disabled", Proceeding of the Third International
Conference on Computers for Handicapped Persons, Vienna, July 8-10
1992 and also Jan Engelen and Tom Wesley, "SGML: A Major
Opportunity for Access to Information", Proceedings of Technology
and Persons with Disabilities Conference, California State
University, Northridge, March 18-21 1992.

Designing products with special needs considerations in view often
leads to better designed products for the mainstream market e.g.
compact audio cassettes were designed to help blind people overcome
the difficulties of using reel-to-reel tape.  Users with special
needs are not confined to those with disabilities - everyone has
special needs at certain times and in certain circumstances.  There
is a limit to the amount of visual information that can be
displayed on a dashboard without jeopardising safe driving.  Also
car drivers have long been used to foot-operated control devices.

Eric



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| Eric Cameron, Visiting Professor   | Telephone : +44 504 265621 x5384        |
| Dept. of Applied Computing         | Fax       : +44 504 370040              |
| Magee College, Univ. of Ulster     | Internet : cameron.e@mgvax.ulster.ac.uk |
| Derry, N. Ireland, UK, BT48 7JL    | Janet    : cameron.e@uk.ac.ulster.mgvax |


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Subject: Re: ASAP and Procomm Plus 2.0
From: CBIRGE@hamp.hampshire.edu (Colin Birge)

Re Jude DaShiell's question about Procomm and Telemate, I can
report that Telemate doesn't go through BIOS; it writes directly to
screen.  I asked the author of the program about offering an option
(as Telix does) to run Telemate's output through BIOS, but he
didn't seem very interested, possibly because I haven't registered
Telemate yet (sheepish grin.)  That's probably the cause of your
problem right now, at least with Telemate.  I can't speak to Procomm.


-- Colin Birge  (CBIRGE@hamp.hampshire.edu)
"You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried
to earn an honest living."  -- G.B.S..

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NOTE: The last time I suggested an opinion to Hampshire College, they laughed.




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Subject: Re: Newspapers on Internet
From: ae446@freenet.carleton.ca (Nigel Allen)


The misc.activism.progressive newsgroup is not a newspaper, but
includes a lot of articles from newsletters and student or
alternative newspapers that are well worth reading.
Anything with the letters N L N S in the subject line is
from New Liberation News Service, and is likely to be
particularly interesting.


--
Nigel Allen, Toronto, Ontario, Canada  ae446@freenet.carleton.ca




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Subject: asap and procomm plus
From: dashiell@nadc.nadc.navy.mil (Jude DaShiell)

I have an idea when things like this happen.
Fortunately you saved your old .prm file.
Guard it with your life.
If these .prm files are ascii files that hold parameter configuration
information in them, why not copy one to a different name.
Once this is done, try the command:
fc old.prm new.prm >diff.prm

What this will do is to show you if there are any differences between
the two files.
20 to 1 one or more of those differences is silencing asap.

<dashiell@nadc.nadc.navy.mil>
j. DaShiell
Naval Air Warfare Center
Aircraft Division Warminster
Street and Jacksonville Roads
Warminster, PA   18974-5000
(215)-441-2229




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                 End of Issue # 924 of the Blind News Digest

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