ALC integration Club

Small Talk - BlindNewWorld As she settled in for her flight to New York, Greta couldn’t help but notice the woman next to her holding a stack of blank pages with raised dots. She was running her fingertips over them quickly. Greta decided to risk being nosy. “Is that braille? I’ve never seen it before.” “Do you want to touch…

The Pool Party - BlindNewWorld Stacy’s 9-year-old daughter hosted a backyard pool party for her classmates. Madison, who has low vision, was one of the first guests to arrive. “She is beyond excited,” Madison’s mom said. “I think she put her bathing suit on before breakfast!” But Stacy was visibly worried. How could she ensure Ma...

Identity 2016: Facebook lets blind people 'see' its photos

As the internet becomes dominated by images, Facebook is launching a system which can "read" photos and tell visually impaired people what appears in them.

The internet is changing. From a medium based almost entirely on text, it is now becoming increasingly picture-led. An estimated 1.8 billion images are uploaded every day to social networks such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Good news for aspiring photographers, bad news for blind or partially sighted users who often have no way of telling what is in an image - despite the available modern assistive technologies.

But a new service from Facebook, being launched on Tuesday, is attempting to remedy that.

Blind people use sophisticated navigation software called screenreaders to make computers usable. They turn the contents of the screen into speech output or braille. But they can only read text and can't "read" pictures.

Using artificial intelligence (AI), Facebook's servers can now decode and describe images uploaded to the site and provide them in a form that can be read out by a screenreader.

Facebook says it has now trained its software to recognise about 80 familiar objects and activities. It adds the descriptions as alternative text, or alt text, on each photo. The more images it scans, the more sophisticated the software will become.

Some of the objects the new technology can recognise are:

The man behind the development is Matt King, a Facebook engineer who lost his sight as a result of retinitis pigmentosa - a condition which destroys the light sensitive cells in the retina.

"On Facebook, a lot of what happens is extremely visual," King says. "And, as somebody who's blind, you can really feel like you're left out of the conversation, like you're on the outside."

The technology that King and his team have developed uses Facebook's in-house object-recognition software to decipher what an image contains. It has been trained to recognise items such as food and vehicles.

"Our artificial intelligence has advanced to the point where it's practical for us to try to get computers to describe pictures in a meaningful way," King says.

"This is in its very early stages, but it's helping us move in the direction of that goal of including every single person who wants to participate in the conversation."

The system currently describes images in fairly basic terms such as: "There are two people in this image and they are smiling."

Last month, Twitter added a similar function which enables users to manually add their own descriptive text to images. Although the descriptions may be better, it requires users to actively choose to do it, whereas Facebook's new system automatically tags every photo.

King and Facebook would like the system to go one step further and use face recognition to identify people in a picture by name with help from their database of users, but others are resisting the idea on privacy grounds.

For King, it is a matter of principle - he says sighted and visually-impaired people should have equal access to the content posted online. Sighted people know who is in many of the photos they see, so blind people should also be allowed that same privilege, he believes.

"I feel I have a right to that information," he says. "I am asking for information that is already available to other people to be revealed to me. So I see it as a matter of fairness."

Jeff Wieland, head of the Facebook accessibility team, says the social networking site is investing in accessibility and devising strategies for different communities, to allow them to engage with it.

He says the site is "going to have dedicated teams thinking about how to get all these different communities on-board and connecting with each other. That is the chance for us to be equalisers and to really empower the world".

Hear more from Matt King in Default World, first broadcast on the BBC World Service on 2 April as part of the Identity season. An edited version will be broadcast as an Analysis documentary on BBC Radio 4.

Follow on Twitter and on Facebookor email [email protected]

As people become increasingly connected and more mobile, the BBC is exploring how identities are changing.

Learn more about the BBC's Identity season or join the discussion on Twitter using the hashtag .

The new way to access printed information for print and visually impaired!
VOICEYE is the smartphone application enabling those with print impairments to access printed information using a VOICEYE code on the printed material.

Information regarding the VOICEYE code on the printed material:
•VOICEYE can hold as much as two A4 pages of text on a 2.5 square centimeter code.
•There’s no need for a data or internet connection to decode a VOICEYE code, as the code itself stores the data.
•The VOICEYE App will use the phone camera to automatically scan the code and bring all of the text into the phone.

Just imagine! You can access any printed information that is around you with your own smartphone.
All education materials, all government materials, all books, notice boards in museums or libraries, in fact just about anything, once a document is produced with a VOICEYE code, any material becomes accessible and is accurately identified.
In South Korea, the VOICEYE solution has been successfully applied to schools for the blind, universities with special education, publishing companies, state-run corporations, local newspapers and others. The VOICEYE solution is very popular for Dyslexia and the visually impaired. The Korean government has adopted the VOICEYE solution on its official documents, such as social security information, electricity, water, local tax bills and so on.

VOICEYE App:
Make your dreams come true with a VOICEYE code.
Scan a VOICEYE code at the top right corner of the printed material. You then have access to the book you buy, the textbook you study, utility bills and prescriptions, it will then be opened automatically on your smartphone and the text can be read aloud with TTS (Text-to-Speech) software like on the iPhone or iPad (VoiceOver), or with TALKS or Mobile Speaks.
The VOICEYE code is created by the VOICEYE Maker Add-In, which you add into MS-Word, Quark Xpress and Adobe InDesign programs. Quark Xpress and InDesign are programs for publishers.

[Main Features]

1. Access to printed information
- Scan a VOICEYE code at the top right corner of a page.
- Text can be displayed on your smartphone screen in 5 high contrast text viewing modes (colored text) and read out the text with TTS like.
- 10 zoom levels in font size

2. Voice Tag (Buy labels: http://www.voiceye.com/eng)
- Attach a label to the object that you want to identify. (documents, music CDs, food containers, etc.)
- The object can be easily identified by recording a voice message or inputting text.

3. Magnifier
- Provides 6 zoom levels
- 5 high contrast viewing modes to maximize text readability
- Magnifying various sources using camera or gallery

Voiceye

With tens of thousands of apps to choose from, how do you decide which apps are best for your students who are visually impaired?

In the new AFB Press book "iOS in the Classroom: A Guide for Teaching Students with Visual Impairments" author Larry L. Lewis, Jr. offers practical advice on finding the right apps and the very best resources: http://www.afb.org/info/programs-and-services/professional-development/education/finding-the-right-ios-apps-for-students/1235

Image: a young girl wearing a pink shirt and glasses, crossing her arms over her chest. She has an iPad in a bright orange-red case in front of her

A Letter to Parents of Teenagers Who are Newly Blind or Visually Impaired http://www.familyconnect.org/blog/familyconnect-a-parents-voice/a-letter-to-parents-of-teenagers-who-are-newly-blind-or-visually-impaired/12?_ga=1.91241434.1794517708.1458748237

Image: a young man with glasses, sitting in a classroom