Apps, iPads help workers with disabilities

From: http://articles.sfgate.com/

Jonathan Avila uses his iPad in ways most people might not realize are possible: The device reads e-mail to him while he's traveling to work, tells him which way to walk when he is lost, and even lets him know if there's a sidewalk on the other side of the street. Avila needs these features because he's visually impaired.

"Work bought it as a testing device, but I've claimed it as my own since it makes me more efficient," says Avila, chief accessibility officer for SSB Bart Group, a firm that helps companies implement technology for people with disabilities.

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Apple has added features that make the iPhone and iPad easily accessible, not only to visually impaired people, but also to those with hearing loss and other challenges. The iPhone 4 and the iPad 2, for example, come with VoiceOver, a screen reader for those who can't read print, as well as FaceTime, video-calling software for people who communicate using sign language. Apple has said that iOS 5 - due later this year - will contain improvements to VoiceOver and LED flash and custom vibration settings to let users see and feel when someone is calling.

A looming issue

More such devices will make their way into the workplace to assist people with physical challenges in the next five years. Disability and aging go hand in hand: As Baby Boomers work past age 65, companies will increasingly face this issue.

The incidence of disability in the workplace is 19.4 percent at age 45 and rises to about 50 percent by age 70, according to Jennifer Woodside, chief executive officer of the Disability Training Alliance. Those disabilities can include vision and hearing loss, issues with mobility and dexterity, and learning and cognitive challenges - as well as communications problems.

The global market for assistive technologies, including those used in the home, is projected to reach $40.9 billion in 2016, up from $30.5 billion this year, according to a report from BCC Research that's scheduled to be released this month. In addition to Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Google and Hewlett-Packard make workplace technologies that are accessible to people with a range of abilities.

"Boomers will demand products, services and workplaces that adapt to their needs and desires," says Rich Donovan, chief investment officer at WingSail Capital. Crossover technology such as the iPad, which works well both for people with disabilities and the broader consumer market, are the "holy grail" of business and disability efforts and will drive growth in disability-related capital spending, he says.

Donovan, who has cerebral palsy, just received his first iPad as a Father's Day gift. "I love it - it's simple to use, and it's the ideal accessible technology," he says.

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Companies such as Apple are motivated, at least in part, to create products that work for people with disabilities because the population is aging, says Dorrie Rush, marketing director of accessible technology at Lighthouse International, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting vision loss.

Better technology

In the past two years, particularly since the release of the iPhone 3GS that came equipped with VoiceOver, Rush says she has noticed a vast improvement in the technology available to visually impaired users.

For people who need to read office memos or other printed materials, Freedom Scientific sells a scanning and reading appliance for $1,800. Alternatively, there's a free app called SayText that uses the camera from the iPhone 4 to take a photo of a document, prompting the app to read the text aloud. Similarly, ZoomReader, an app from Ai Squared that sells for about $20, reads the text in images from the iPhone 4 camera.

Identifying money can be a challenge for visually impaired people because a $1 bill comes in the same size and color as a $100 bill. Reizen sells a portable money reader on Amazon.com for $99.95. In March the LookTel Money Reader app was released for the iPhone, selling for just $1.99. In April the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing released EyeNote, a free money reader.

Workers who find it difficult to speak because they have cerebral palsy or have suffered a stroke once needed to spend thousands of dollars on speech-generating devices. Instead of shelling out $3,000, they can now buy an iPad for $500 and an app called Proloquo2Go from AssistiveWare that sells for about $190, says Avila.

Market data provided by Bloomberg News

An iPhone App Helps the Blind Identify Currency

By NICK BILTON
From http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/

For the millions of blind people living in the United States, paying for something in cash can pose major challenges because there is no difference between the size and shape of a $1 or $100 bill. To tackle this problem, many blind people set up systems to identify a bill’s value by folding the notes into different sizes and shapes, which then make them easily identifiable later.

A new application, the LookTel Money Reader, available for $2 on the Apple iOS platform, hopes to help solve this problem by taking advantage of the devices camera to “read money” and speak the value of the currency out loud.

According to the company’s Web site, LookTel recognizes all United States currency and can read $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 bills aloud.

LookTel, which is made by the software company Ipplex, says the app can recognize currency denominations in real-time. This means that users can simply wave their phone in the direction of the currency and it will speak the bill’s value as it falls into view of the camera. The application does not require an Internet connection.

The currency reading software will soon be available on other platforms, LookTel said.

Identifying United States currency has long been a problem for the visually impaired. Other countries print currency on different sizes and shapes specifically to help people with sight problems identify the different denominations through touch.

Last year, a federal appellate court ruled that under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Treasury Department must change the currency to make it more accessible to the visually impaired.

The iPhone’s software already offers a number of features to assist the visually impaired. Under the phone’s Settings menu, users can navigate to an Accessibility area, which enables them to enlarge the phone’s graphics and text. Apple also offers Voice Over, which speaks text aloud when the phone’s screen is touched.

New glasses allow blind soldier to 'see' with his tongue

A soldier blinded in battle has become the first member of the armed forces to test a special pair of glasses which allow him to 'see' using his tongue.

Lance Corporal Craig Lundberg, who was blinded in a grenade attack in Basra, is trying the glasses which turn pictures into electrical impulses that are felt on the tongue.

The different sensations mean he can distinguish between light and dark and negotiate his way around objects.

Jonathan Beale reports.

The contact lens that can help the blind see again

By Fiona Macrae

The groundbreaking operation brought significant improvements in vision within a matter of weeks.

The procedure uses a person's own cells to heal damage to the cornea - the transparent outermost layer of the eye.

It is carried out under local anaesthetic, with patients returning home within two hours of surgery, removing the need for expensive hospital stays.

The three patients treated so far had very poor vision caused by corneal disease - the fourth most common form of blindness, affecting around 10million worldwide.

Enlarge

How it works: The treatment can restore eye sight using steam cells

It is caused by genetics, surgery, burns, infection or chemotherapy, and treatments usually include grafts and transplants and drugs such as steroids.

The team from the University of New South Wales in Sydney harnessed the power of stem cells - 'master cells' with the ability to turn into other cell types.

They removed small samples of stem cells from the eyes of two men and a woman with corneal disease and grew them on a contact lens.

The stem cell-coated contacted lenses were then put into the patients' eyes for around three weeks.

During that time, the stem cells moved off the lenses and began to heal the damaged corneas, the journal Transplantation reports.

Using a person's own cells removes any need for donors and means the transplant will not be rejected.

Researcher Dr Nick Di Girolamo said: 'The procedure is totally simple and cheap.

'Unlike other techniques, it requires no foreign human or animal products, only the patient’s own serum, and is completely non-invasive.

'There's no suturing, there is no major operation. You don’t need any fancy equipment.'

The contact lenses used in the operation are already widely used after eye surgery.

The researchers hope the technique can be adapted for other parts of the eye, such as the retina, and even elsewhere in the body.

Damage to retinal blood vessels is behind a range of conditions that can lead to loss of sight including many cases of age-related macular degeneration, or AMD, the most common cause of blindness in the elderly.

Dr Di Girolamo said: 'If we can do this procedure in the eye, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work in other major organs such as the skin, which behaves in a very similar way to the cornea.'

Dr Kuldip Sidhu, a stem cell expert at the same university, said the 'clever strategy' was a step towards using stem cells to treat debilitating human diseases.

Professor Loane Skene, of the University of Melbourne, said: 'Provided that patients are told that the new procedure is experimental and possible risks are not yet known, and they then consent to have it, this use of a patient's stem cells is no more ethically contentious than a skin transplant.'

In Britain, Sonal Rughani, of the RNIB, said: 'This small-scale study reveals promising outcomes with the use of contact lenses. We await further developments of this innovative nature.'

The work is one of several studies being carried out around the world which aim to use stem cells to cure blindness.

The 'Portable Eye' Helps the Blind to See

Inventor says device for blind has much broader uses

The KNFB Reader lets users photograph printed material, then reads it back. (George Rizer/ Globe Staff)

By Scott Kirsner October 26, 2008

When Peter Alan Smith pulls out his phone in a crowded Back Bay restaurant, there's no clue that his Nokia is by far the most expensive mobile phone in the entire place. He has about $2,400 in software loaded onto the $600 device.

But then it becomes apparent what's unique about Smith's phone: A flash goes off when he snaps a picture of the menu, and a few seconds later, his phone has translated the page of text into speech, and started reciting the options through his earpiece at a rapid clip.

Smith developed a degenerative eye disease when he was 18, and he is now legally blind. It has been about two decades since he could read a restaurant menu independently. He first heard about the phone on a podcast series called "Blind Cool Tech" and took out a low-interest loan to buy it.

"At work, I can take a picture of two different documents to figure out which is which," says Smith, who works for John Hancock. "At home, if I'm making chili, I can take a picture of a can to make sure it's the kidney beans before I open it."

The software that translates the text in high-resolution digital photos into speech is made by KNFB Reading Technologies Inc. in Wellesley Hills. It was developed by Ray Kurzweil, the local inventor who has been coming up with technological breakthroughs for the blind since the mid-1970s. But as with many of his innovations, Kurzweil plans for the software to be useful - perhaps incredibly useful - to sighted users in a few years from now.

Kurzweil released his first reading machine, developed in partnership with the National Federation for the Blind, in 1976; on the day it was unveiled, TV anchor Walter Cronkite used its speech synthesizer as he signed off the air. The device could scan printed pages, decipher the letters, and speak the words aloud. It was about the size of a washing machine and cost $50,000. Stevie Wonder bought the first production model, Kurzweil recalls.

In the decades that followed, much of the scanning and speech technology Kurzweil developed evolved into the scanners and scanning software now built into many printers and PCs. Burlington-based Nuance Communications Inc. sells several software products originally created by Kurzweil to convert printed documents into text.

In 2002, the president of the National Federation of the Blind asked Kurzweil about portable reading technology; though his reading machine had gotten smaller, it still resided on a desktop. "There's a lot of printed material that you don't want to bring back to your desk - or you can't - like a sign on a wall or a bank ATM display," Kurzweil says.

Kurzweil predicted a pocket-size reading machine was only about six years away. Kurzweil and the federation began collaborating to develop the necessary software. It had to be smart enough to interpret a photo taken at any angle, in any sort of lighting, with random images sometimes in the background.

An interim device, released in 2006, married a Canon digital camera with a personal digital assistant; it sold for $3,500. The cellphone version debuted earlier this year. It works only on a Nokia N82 phone, which features a built-in 5-megapixel camera, with flash. The camera offers spoken feedback to the user as to whether it has captured the entire page. After about 20 or 30 seconds of processing the image and turning it into text, it starts speaking. The standard phone with software sells for $2,145, but also includes a talking GPS system, and the ability to read any Web page to its user, among other features. (It's also good at identifying the denominations on printed money.)

James Gashel, vice president of business development for KNFB Reading Technologies, is also a user of the device. "I don't use it to read books," he says, "but I use it for the daily mail, business cards, and brochures. I was at a Catholic men's retreat over the weekend, and I used it to read the schedule."

Gashel says there are about 1.3 million blind people in the United States; since February, the company has sold "thousands" of the readers, he says. But the population of dyslexics is about three times larger. A new version of the mobile phone reader will soon be available that is targeted to them. "These are people who can see print, but have difficulty tracking from word to word," Gashel says. "So this new version of the software helps people whose problem is that they get lost in a series of words on a page."

Still more intriguing is how the phone might assist other users. A prototype in Kurzweil's lab is able to photograph a document in any of seven different languages and translate it into English, Kurzweil says he has demonstrated it in public appearances, taking a photo of text in French and having the phone read it in English. It sounds a bit like Douglas Adams's fictional Babel fish - a universal translator.

"We call it 'snap and translate,' " he says. How soon will it be available? "Two or three years," says Kurzweil, adding that he is talking to cellphone manufacturers. "We also have a prototype of speech to speech translation, where you can speak in one language and have it come out in another," he says. "Right now, that requires a bit more computation than a cellphone can support," though he notes that phones are getting more powerful each year.

As it turned out, Smith didn't really need to have his phone read the menu to him last month at the Parish Cafe. He had been to the restaurant several years ago and remembered eating a tasty steak sandwich. So that's what he ordered, and we spent the meal talking about his experiences running the Boston Marathon and his tandem cycling hobby. He says he uses the reader several times a day, about equally at home and at work. He told me he's amazed by what the KNBF software can do - "it's a portable eye, essentially" - but that he's hoping the cost will come down, so more blind and visually impaired people can afford it. "The cost is prohibitive," he says.

Gashel says, "I think the cost of the phone will come down as the product expands in terms of who it can reach. The bigger the customer base, the more we can bring the price down." Still, he says, $2,100 isn't that expensive when it comes to technology for the blind. He says he recently purchased a personal digital assistant that can render phone numbers and appointments in Braille, for $4,500, and also paid $5,500 for a flat-screen TV. "And I can't even see it," he quips. "But the people who come to my house seem to like it."

Scott Kirsner can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com.