One way to read letters using the vOICe

There have been several attempts to read printed letters using the vOICe. I have one way to do this. This is not the only way and I am still learning what letters look like. My reading has been limited to recognizing the shapes of letters using the vOICe. I had planned to use the windows magnifier to enlarge the size of the letters. I have used notepad as my wordprocessor of choice.

1. Set the font size to 72 or, if you want to try the magnifier, set the magnification level to 6.

2. Set the vOICe to follow the mouse pointer and activate negative video. Also, set the speed to quarter.

3. Hit windows+m to minimize everything.

4. Navigate to notepad.

5. If you are not using the magnifier, then set the font size to 72. If you are using the magnifier, do not bother doing this.

6. If using a screen reader, then get your mouse cursor to follow the insertion pointer.

7. Write the word CAT.

8. Navigate to the letter “C”.

9. Sit back and enjoy the soundscape.

10. You can activate the edge detection feature but there is no real need to do so.

Also, be careful with the letters “A” and “L”. They seem to run together. Other letters may also do this. It is possible to slowdown the vOICe even further. The settings like half speed and quarter speed are relative to the normal speed of sounding the soundscape. You change this normal speed and then slow things down. You change the speed via the Edit | Visual Sound Preferences | Visual sound
duration (s) per video frame dialogue box.
It will make reading words easier. Of course, with practice, you can increase your reading speed. To navigate from word to word, use the arrow keys.

Visual experiences in the blind induced by an auditory sensory substitution device

This is a paper on the the vOICe co-authored by Jamie Ward and Dr. Meijer.
The abstract is here

Interactive training facilitates active full-body use of The vOICe

Zachary Reynolds “novel training paradigm for The vOICe involving active, cooperative tasks”. A popular task involved users using the vOICe to play a form of tag in which two subjects wearing The vOICe try to turn off their opponent’s luminescent red
hearts which are attached to their backpacks.

See this direct link for details.

A program to learn shapes using the vOICe

I have created a shape exerciser to compliment the exercise mode of the vOICe. The program lets you build your own shape library for exercising. The shape exerciser is a tool for practicing shape recognition. You can navigate to the following link for downloading the shape exerciser.
Shape Exerciser Zip Installer

With thanks to Jacob Kruger for the file hosting.

Nuthatches

The idea behind this post is to illustrate how color and some descriptions can be used to interpret an image that a person has never seen. As always, these images have been percieved using the The vOICe.

<a href="http://www.blindliving.com/"A friend posted about nuthatches on twitter so I decided to take a look at them. There are several kinds of nuthatches but for our purposes, we will focus on the white-breasted nuthatch and the red-breasted nuthatch.
See the below link for the red-breasted nuthatch.

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/PHOTO/MED/red_breasted_nuthatch_1.jpg

see the following link for a picture of the white-breasted nuthatch.

http://www.birdsasart.com/White-breasted-Nuthatch-soft-light-VERT-_H2D8927-McLeansville,-NC.jpg

I have never seen a bird before so do not have an idea of its shape. I know what a breast is. I heard the entire image and then decided to find the red breast. The red color filter did the job so I now knew where the breast was. I now slowed down the speed to quarter. There is a wavy line as you approach the right of the image at the left and reach the correct height. I suspect that is the stripe of the nuthatch but I cannot be sure. As for the wings and the bill, I do not know where they are. They are bound to be there but my knowledge of bird anatomy is rather limited to be able to find them.

As for the white-breasted nuthatch, not much to say except that the shape is interesting. The color filter does not help here but I have not tried all the color.

Also, I tried the skin filter and got silence. I take it that the skin filter is optimized for human skin?

Jacob Kruger pointed out that the orange filter gave the most interesting results in the red breasted nuthatche’s case. If the description at http://www.birdsource.org/ibs/IBSspecies/rebnut/index.html is correct, then the orange portion is the under part of the nuthatch.

Finally, to read more about the nuthatch, navigate to the following link.

http://www.cjwildlife.com/news/id=30/upside-down_birds___courtesy_of_the_vermont_institute_of_natural_science_-_vins.html

Visual experiences in the blind induced by an auditory sensory substitution device

See this paper dealing with the the vOICe in the journal Consciousness and Cognition.

A box of grapes

See this box of grapes on the counter in a shopping mall. You can see part of the counter and the box as well as the grapes.

There is a lot of pixel noise so the color filters do not work well here. The image was taken under artificial light.

fruits

Two monkeys

See this image of two monkeys. I took it using my Nokia E51 through a screen door that lead to the balconey of the guest house I was staying at. I believe they are in a “compromising” position.

The back of the monkeys is towards the camera. Slow down the image and you will be able to distinguish the individual monkeys.

2monkeys

Looking at housing societies

I was looking for a new house in a Housing Society for a relative. A housing society around here is an agglomeration of buildings made by a single entity. These buildings are usually in a compound. The compound has its own shops, medical facilities etc. I was using my net book with my current video glasses. Part of the compound was still being constructed. My mom and I strolled over to it. I could hear men digging some distance away so I turned my head in that direction and tried to see whether I could watch them dig. That did not happen but I was able to make out a small pile of stones that was lying to the left. For some reason, that made my mom sit up for the first time in so many years and take notice of the vOICe. After that, I saw plants, several doorways and walls and even had a chance to look at some staircases. I had to of course remember to look down while on the staircase. Staircases do have distinct rhythms. I was also able to see people and was able to track the side profile of a man as he walked past my position. I did once mistake two walls that were close together for some plants but I suspect there was some clutter in the scene. Doorways are also easy to make out once you know what to look for. A half opened door has a sort of angry sound unless of course the door is a little broad which tempers the sound. Context of course plays a very large role in all of this. For example, I was looking at some corrugated sheets they had placed around one of the buildings. These sheets resembled shutters of shops. Subsequently, as we cruised around the compound in a battery-operated golf cart, I saw something else that looked like corrugated sheets. At that point, my dad explained that these were not corrugated sheets but, they’ve had a similar texture to those sheets. He described it in terms of ridges and valleys and, upon feeling them, I’m not going to disagree with that description.

I would recommend a battery operated golf cart to anyone. In case you want to try driving with the vOICe, I doubt you could find anything better. They are quite open so you can track traffic noise and I suspect it should be possible to mount a camera on them. I did not try driving the golf cart this time because of the poor field of view of my camera.

One of the reasons we had all gone to the housing society was to gauge whether we could estimate the quality of construction. My civil engineer father explained to me that gauging the quality of construction is virtually impossible in a plastered wall. Most of the initial houses we saw were finished so all you could see was smooth walls and floors. The trick apparently is to see a house that is being constructed. There would be irregularities in the concrete which would tell you that the construction is of poor quality. I was unable to really see any such concrete on this trip.

There were also several balconies that I was able to perceive.

After seeing a number of sample houses, we returned to the office of the real estate agent. I decided to flip through some of his brochures. Surprise surprise, I was able to distinguish that there were different shapes on that brochure. The trouble is, I don’t know the English alphabet all that well. Also, I wish there was a way to increase the inter-letter spacing and to make them larger. I did try two fold zoomed but that did not help much.

Finding my optic nerve

I had a b-scan of my eyes. Checkout the image of that scan. The optic nerve is the wavey line towards the top of the image.

There is a lot of scarring in my eyes so not much else is visible. The doctor doing the ultra sound had a lot of difficulty in finding the optic nerve. She had to press the probe down hard and that got a tad uncomfortable. My eye has been described as a disorganized globe. It is very difficult to determine the exact structures inside my eyes. You can try and sdee whether you can analyze the shapes of these structures.