Visually impaired persons will no longer have to depend on their family or friends to read out the bill at a telephone booth. A machine manufactured by Tata Indicom reads aloud the bill amount. After the customer makes the call, the talking phone billing machine, ‘speaks’ the bill amount to its customer.
Richard Erickson, a resident of Burlington, Vermont, USA, is delighted. He is legally blind, but the next time he goes out to vote, he will not need to rely on a member of his family to read out the ballot paper to him. The Inspire Vote-by-Phone system will soon enable visually impaired people in Vermont, to vote using the keypad on a special telephone in the privacy of a voting booth.
Acuity Medical has successfully completed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.) complied clinical trial of its TheraMac device. This would treat dry age-related macular degeneration (A.M.D.). Prior to the F.D.A. trial, an open label study was conducted on 404 patients.
The Fonix Speech Group, an operating division of Fonix(R) Corporation (OTCBB: FNIX), announced Fonix DECtalk(R) text-to-speech (T.T.S) on screen reading software by Code Factory, a major producer of assistive software for handheld devices in the European and Asian markets.
SouthernLINC Wireless, an Atlanta, U.S.A. based company announced that it is offering ‘Enhancements for the Visually Impaired’ (E.V.I) software for Motorola's i355 phone.
The software includes Text-to-Speech (T.T.S) output. As the user scrolls through the handset's phone book playback of names, numbers and contact types occur. It also plays back the word "calling" as the user makes a call and reads off information such as signal strength, battery level, date and time.
The world's first portable electronic Braille display is small enough to fit in a pocket and can even be rolled up like a newspaper. The display consists of a sheet of tiny plastic paddles that bend in response to a voltage. It is designed to connect to a cell phone or laptop, and could also replace the liquid crystal screen of an ordinary personal digital assistant (P.D.A.).
Soon, blind and visually impaired people will have the opportunity to learn science just like anyone else. Quantum Simulations, has developed tutoring and assessment software based on artificial intelligence (A.I.). This has been the result of a six-month, 100,000 research project, funded by the National Eye Institute, a division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Salesboom.com, a leading provider of hosted Customer Relationship Management (C.R.M.) software solutions has announced a new user interface option for visually impaired users. Describing it as a breakthrough for the C.R.M. industry, Troy Muise, C.E.O. and co-founder, of the company said, “[It] gives accessibility to our end-users across the board with no limitations.”
The new interface, which has been completely remodelled, is the first of its kind in the hosted C.R.M. software industry, and is set to pave the way for better accessibility options in the future.
It may turn out to be the most revolutionary step in the field of visual disability since Louis Braille’s embossed dots on thick paper in 1829. Divya Drishti, or divine sight, is a high-tech, infrared-based system that helps blind people in spatially orienting themselves, thereby facilitating navigation within closed environs such as offices, railway stations and even malls.
Developed by Pallavi Tiwari and Dhruv Sakalley, final year biomedical engineering students of ‘Shri G.S. Institute of Technology and Science’, Indore, Madhya Pradesh, the system is easy to operate.
Visiting your favourite restaurant or pub may no longer be a chore. Now, pointing your cell phone in a particular direction, can precisely establish its location, and the easiest way to get there. Researchers at Britain’s Southampton University have reportedly developed a cell phone with interactive information to find local points of interest on a map. According to the research, a system called Map Snapper has been created that processes a snapshot of a printed map, captured on camera phone, and forwards an interactive version of the same map back to the handset.
Facebook comments