Monster Media 1993 #2/Image.iso/magazine/s_m0693.zip/S&M-05

Text File | 1993-05-30 | 7KB | 113 lines

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 ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░Information Access With Braille░░░░░░░by Bryan Dufelmeier
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          As a blind person interested in computers and reading I had to
     have some way of satisfying my interests. Although there are many
     ways of accessing the PC screen, I'll limit my discussion to
     braille and speech systems. I'll tell you why I prefer braille and
     what its advantages and disadvantages have been.
          There are a number of braille displays and, I hope without
     sounding too much like an ad campaign I hope to show you my
     favorite.
          So where to begin. I've been using braille all my life. I've
     read books in hardcopy books. I read about the first developments
     in braille computers and heard about those using speech systems.
     There were reading machines with scanners and speech that cost
     $20,000 and took a great deal of work to use with documents that
     didn't fit a standard format.
          I listened to books on tape and had them read to me. In short,
     I found ways to follow my interests. My interest in computers
     really started in college with my roommate and his Apple II
     Plus.
          When I got my Versabraille, the braille device I'm currently
     using, I was in seventh heaven.  I was ready to print a
     paper for an evening class I was taking.
          Then the story really begins. I like braille because you get
     a character-for-character reproduction of the screen. With speech
     you always got some program interpreting characters, names, and
     symbols. Screen formatting is difficult enough to follow with
     speech because you have to pay attention to everything the program
     says about punctuation and anything else it's set to announce. With
     braille you can see centering and paragraphs and other formatting
     conventions. Speech is faster but it has its limitations.
          Unfortunately, it's not a perfect world and the honeymoon with
     my new braille device did end. It couldn't track those highlight
     bars and other nonstandard cursors, and had no way of handling
     windows. Speech software was considerably more advanced. Through
     the use of menus you could cofigure soft cursor tracking and
     windows to jump to or even monitor for changes.
          Slowly, and I do mean slowly, the pc software that works with
     my braille display started adding features but now its development
     has finished because the machine has been deemed out of date.
     There's no more room to put new features in it. It does have some
     internal memory and word processing capabilities but they are so
     limited that I almost never use them anymore. I use it almost
     exclusively as a screen access device for my computer. It also has
     its own keyboard which I use to do most of my input.
          The software improvements in access for the computer have been
     too minimal and too late. What I needed was some uncomplicated yet
     powerful applications that provide real productivity.
          I started reading as soon as I got my computer. In fact, I
     even did some reading of ascii books on my versabraille before I
     got a pc. I learned most of what I know about DOS from reading
     Running MS-DOS on the pc.
          A month after I bought my braille device, the company released
     its replacement. It didn't have any internal functions or a
     keyboard. It was designed to work both as a display for both
     desktop and some laptop models. It came initially in two sizes, 20
     and 40 cell models. A cell it the six-dot group that is used to
     represent braille characters. Later they came out with an 80-cell
     model so a whole line of text could be represented on the screen
     without having to move the reading window.
          Let's look at the difference between six and eight dot
     braille. Most braille is produced in a standard six dots. A popular
     format developed in Europe was an eight dot display. The extra dots
     came in handy for representing foreign language symbols but they
     have some other advantages. In six dot systems the cursor has to
     be hidden by a command before the character at its position can be
     felt. The extra dots in eight dot mode make this unnecessary. In
     addition, this mode allows for the display of the extended ascii
     character set.
          The other major difference between braille displays is the way
     the cursor is routed to specific locations on the screen. Some are
     like mine and use software. This is clumsy and awkward. There
     has never been a software approach that will take the cursor to an
     exact spot on the screen. You can get it as close as the beginning
     of the reading window. The more sophisticated displays have
     hardware features in the form of tiny buttons or optical sensors
     above the cells and this allows for direct routing of the cursor to
     specific screen locations.
          There two other points worth mentioning here. First, some
     diplays have extra cells that give the cursor and reading window
     positions and in some information on screen attributes as well.
     Second, some displays are completely software driven, others are
     completely hardware driven and some are a combination. Some use a
     serial and others a parallel connection. All have the same basic
     function, conveying with varying degrees of detail and ease the
     information on the pc screen. They all allow you to access
     information in a pc file. This now leaves us with all the
     wondrous possibilities that exist today, including "Smoke and
     Mirrors."
          The beauty of disk-based publications is that they can in many
     instances be customized to the preferences of the individual
     reader. Colors can be changed or ignored. The cursor size can
     sometimes be altered or just used in the normal way. If more than
     one way exists to move through a menu system than the preferred
     method can be used. Different levels of sophistication are required
     for different kinds of documents. The software is available to give
     users these options. This means to me that I can easily find
     publications that are both easy to read and contain an unabridged
     edition of the same material regularly produced for my sighted
     counterparts. It is the regular edition. No special pricing is
     necessary and no extra waiting to get the same piece of material.
     Whether it be technical or general interest, the choice is mine and
     the choices are growing.
          Now I must say I am glad I have found "Smoke and
          Mirrors." It is a delightful and thought-provoking gem
     that may very well get    better over time.  I look forward
     to reading and contributing to it in the future.

                                   -end-
                                   Copyright (c) 1993 Bryan    Dufelmeier