BREAKING NEWS: Oratio for BlackBerry is Now Available

We have exciting news. Today, Humanware and Code Factory announced the release of Oratio for BlackBerry®, the first screen reader available for the popular Blackberry line of cell phone/PDAs manufactured by Research In Motion. We have had the good fortune to have a Blackberry Curve 8520 and a pre-release version of Oratio in our AFB TECH lab for a couple of days. We are putting it through the paces for a full product evaluation in an upcoming issue of AccessWorld®, but in the meantime, we want to provide you with our initial thoughts. Read more about Oratio and our thoughts in AccessWorld.

Congratulations, Deane Blazie!

Today I was honored to present Deane Blazie with the M.C. Migel Medal at the Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA) conference in Orlando.

Deane is perhaps most famous for developing the Braille'n Speak, the world's first notetaker with braille key input and speech or data output. However, his influence has shaped virtually every other kind of assistive technology for people who are blind, including braille printers, braille displays, and speech synthesis.

The seeds of Deane's future grew from a chance meeting and early friendship with Tim Cranmer, a blind man Deane met at a ham radio club in Kentucky. He then went on to found and lead two companies that became world leaders in producing assistive technology for the blind: Maryland Computer Services, later sold to Enabling Technologies, and Blazie Engineering, which was later merged into Freedom Scientific. He is also a founder of ATIA.

It was a very special treat to salute this man who is beloved by his AT colleagues and by the consumers for whom he provided so many opportunities.

I encourage you to learn more about Deane by reading the interview we published in our technology magazine AccessWorld back in January 2000. And, we plan to introduce more material later this year as part of a new focus on assistive technology pioneers.

Federal Court of Appeals Hears Argument about Video Description

This week a San Francisco court heard oral arguments about whether a lawsuit can go forward against Harkin, a movie theater chain that refuses to provide captioning or video description for its customers with disabilities. More information on the hearing is available on disability rights attorney Lainey Feingold's web site, but here are a couple of noteworthy quotes from one of the judges. AFB filed an amicus brief in support of video description and captioning.

"Why wouldn't [Harkins] want to do this? They don't have to tear down theaters, all they have to do is add a little bit of electronic equipment which is getting cheaper by the day. We're not equipped for this but we set it up in a jiffy." — Judge Alex Kozinski

"You are going to lose eventually. I don't know if you are going to lose this case or not, but you are going to lose this battle in the end. You can get out in front of it and be the good guys, or you can be dragged kicking and screaming and look like jerks. I don't understand why you are choosing to fight this battle." — Judge Alex Kozinski

Braille in the Digital Age

This week marks the 201st anniversary of the birth of Louis Braille—the Frenchman who made it possible for blind and visually impaired people to read and write the same books and correspondence as their sighted counterparts. It is therefore timely that the New York Times Magazine just published an article titled "Listening to Braille" that has a lot of people talking.

Rachel Aviv, who wrote the article for The Times, does a great job exploring the debate over teaching braille in a time when audio books and text-to-speech technology are widely available. As both an avid braille reader and technology user, I can attest to the usefulness of both. Braille remains important for all the reasons that print remains important, and it is easier to produce than ever before. It's how children who are blind learn to read, write, and spell and understand the difference between words like there, they're and their.

Speech technologies are extraordinarily valuable as well. Talking books and screen readers have revolutionized life for those of us with vision loss. Helen Keller, who was an avid braille reader, was also a huge advocate for AFB's Talking Books program. Despite the fact that she couldn't make use of the technology herself, she saw the benefit of having both options.

At the end of the day, there is not a one size fits all solution to this debate. People with vision loss will make the decision for themselves which adaptive tools work best for them.

Lou Reed Launches Lou Zoom for People with Vision Loss

We just heard that rock and roll legend Lou Reed created an iPhone app called Lou Zoom for people with low vision—how cool is that? I saw Lou Reed perform in Pittsburgh back in 1984. I had front row balcony seats at the now demolished Syria Mosque near the Pitt campus. It was a great show, and the loudest concert I have ever been to.

That said, how could we not check out the Lou Zoom app? I took a look at it with our AFB TECH interns, and here are our initial thoughts:

• It is inexpensive, only $1.99.
• It is an enhancement for your contacts, but no other iPhone apps.
• It features a crisp high-contrast black-on-white or white-on-black text-only display with no colors or other formatting to get in your way.
• It enlarges names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses to fit the screen horizontally. Therefore, there is no set font size, because it varies.
• A three-letter contact like "Ike" is huge, but "Charles Wesley Clements III" isn't magnified nearly as much.
• It is sharper than using the iPhone's built in Zoom feature, as far as contrast is concerned.
• It is compatible with and actually enhances the iPhone's built-in Zoom app, resulting in less pixelation at higher magnification levels.
• It is a bit klugey to use with VoiceOver, but a person using VoiceOver probably wouldn't use Lou Zoom.
• As with the "Eye Glasses" app, I would not tell someone with low vision to run out and buy an iPhone just because of Lou Zoom, but it would probably be worth it to spend the two bucks if he or she already had an iPhone.

Has anyone else tried it? We'd love to hear your thoughts on it, or in fact, on any other iPhone apps you have found to be useful or accessible. We really love the new Dragon Dictation voice recognition app from Nuance, because it is lightning fast, surprisingly accurate, and can make composing an e-mail or text message much easier. Nuance could help us out by creating better labels for the buttons, but with a little sighted assistance to help you learn where to tap, you are good to go. It is a free app for now, but it is rumored that it will soon have a cost.