ROUGH EDITED COPY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
CIRCLE CAMPUS
DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY EXPO
SESSION 4
ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGIES
AND CAMPUS ACCESS
3:00 p.m. ‑ 4:00 p.m.
APRIL 9, 2009
CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY:
DILLON REPORTING SERVICES
100 NORTH LA SALLE STREET, SUITE 1500
CHICAGO, IL 60602
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This is being provided in a rough‑draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facility communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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>> KEVIN PRICE: I want to introduce the final session of the day here at the Digital Accessibility Expo and this one was set aside specifically for what kind of resources are available for students in assistive technology and so I wanted to introduce our panelists, the people who are going to speak.
First we're going to have our student who has experience at our campus and talking about his experience on campus, and that's Peter Tucic. So he'll start off. And then we'll have Sarah and I talk about our partnership, ACCC and the disability resource center has a partnership that provides assistive technology on the campus to the various labs on campus, so we work together on problem solving, trying to ensure the technology is where the people are who need it and we do a lot of different things on campus to try to promote accessibility in the labs.
Then we're going to have a couple of vendors who we work with on campus who we've dealt with, including Ed Vitu, who is the owner and established the EM Vitu incorporated in 1984. He's a freedom scientific jaws representative, and he also I think has a lot of other ‑‑ we purchase a lot of other different assistive technologies from him.
Also from the director of the adaptive technology for the Chicago Lighthouse for people who are blind or visually impaired is here to talk about some of the technology. They're going to have some handouts and some other things that they're passing around.
First we'll start off with William Bielawski who the director of adaptive technology for the Chicago Lighthouse, so first Peter is going to talk and then we'll go from there.
>> PETER TUCIC: All right. Hello, everyone. I'm Peter Tucic and currently I'm a Russian major at UIC and I'm in my first year and when I originally, you know, had planned on going to different universities, I looked at all different ways in which all the different universities were trying and working on making their ‑‑ the technology and the different things in that university more accessible. I think it was interesting how here at UIC, things have ‑‑ they really have come together on a daily basis how I interact with different technologies and use all sorts of things that the school has implemented to do my daily work. There's more than jaws which is a screen reading program or being a Braille note user which is a note taker. It's much more goes into it, some things, I mean I am in constant e‑mail contact with my professors. All that even making the e‑mail HTML based, making things not as graphical has a lot to go into it, and I post assignments on Blackboard, which is a basically a website where you post your information, and making that site or making UIC's home page accessible and all these things that people overlook and often we don't think of those things as key but that's essentially what makes my university experience no different from anyone else's.
So I know when I had looked at other universities, they will say we have this program or that program we've adapted for your needs, but at UIC, it's more having things accessible for everyone. I can log on to the home page and know that there's no flash buttons and there's no pop‑ups and things of that nature. Everything is text. Everything is HTML based, and I don't know, I think that's the key, and the Disability Resource Center really understands that in the way they worked to make all this accessible is excellent.
I was talking to Kevin about I'm a Russian major and trying to find Russian Braille is ‑‑
(Laughter.)
I don't know what it is. It's crazy. I can't find it, but it's just knowing that that's there, and that the Disability Resource Center and Kevin and Roxana have done everything and things will be accessible and things will be e‑mailed to me, and I know no matter what, all of those types of things will be taken care of, and just as Kevin said, with making certain parts of the university accessible, like the computer labs. If one of my classes is meeting in any lab on campus, there will be a computer in that lab pretty much, most labs, Kevin, there might be one that doesn't. I don't know. But most labs they have jaws on the computers, and I can work alongside all my classmates, and it's great really to be able to go anywhere and to have the same ‑‑ the professors can have the same expectations of me and I can have the same opportunity as other students would have, and I think it's great that this university really puts a lot into that. Sarah and Kevin are going to talk a little bit about the different partnerships and the communication that goes on inside the university, and it really does make a big difference, and I know that everything, you know, whenever there's a challenge, even something as simple as, you know, getting something in Braille, if I really need it like a test or a certain lab manual or something, that all those resources are there, and everything is in place. Sometimes it just might take a little while to come together but it's all there, and that's really what helps me get the job done and work to my fullest potential, and I think that that's excellent.
I don't know if anyone had really any questions for what I do on a daily basis maybe, I don't know, if you want to ask, if anyone out there has anything at all, just yell it if you do. Or if not, then it's all right.
>> KEVIN PRICE: We can have questions later. Or you can ask questions now.
>> PETER TUCIC: If anyone has anything, why not? Or no?
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I got a question for you. Is it your course materials that you have the most problems with or is it basic web browsing or other tools?
>> PETER TUCIC: I think really the web browsing, all the different ‑‑ all those things are taken into consideration beforehand. I think the hardest part of it is definitely the course materials, I mean because I don't always know, for example, this semester I'm in an earth sciences class and I didn't know it would be as visual as it is. It's a very visual class.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Are they using like a course ‑‑ or a cartridge in the course?
>> PETER TUCIC: It is but sometimes those things are just hard to get ahold of. But that's why the document conversion is there, and everything. And I think that the course materials, it's sometimes different things. It's hard to find, you know, the certain ‑‑ there's certain things on line that if I needed scanned, they'll do that. From the university standpoint with making web browsing and all the different websites and links accessible, that's absolutely they're compliant with everything. I think everything is all AAA compliant on all the university websites and just making the fact that all the computer labs and different things around the university is accessible.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Most of the setups are the same on machines across campus?
>> PETER TUCIC: Yeah.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Which is probably important because you got consistency.
>> KEVIN PRICE: We'll talk about that in a second.
>> PETER TUCIC: Kevin's got it covered. He's got the whole thing covered.
(Laughter.)
But I wanted to just reiterate that when we think about accessibility, we think how would Peter type his paper or something, but there's so much more to it that the technologies standpoint really isn't in my hands. The part of it that the university really has accomplished and it's great is the different ‑‑ the communication within the university and how different aspects of the university are accessible. The computer labs, the websites, I mean the different information, and I can register for classes and things like that, that they made accessible, that that really is where my student experience is going to be no different from everyone else's and how everything is accessible to me.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: That's great.
>> PETER TUCIC: Thank you, everybody.
(Applause.)
>> KEVIN PRICE: We want to talk a little bit, I appreciate Peter giving us such high marks with our partnership here on campus. We're really working hard to do our best. It's not perfect, and I know there's a lot of work to be done, but we definitely do the best to try to be both proactive and sometimes it's a little reactive more than we would like, but we do definitely have a partnership that I wanted to talk about, and between, which I think is such an important part, when I came to this campus, is to have both the Disability Resource Center, the aspect on our campus that's here to support people with disabilities, work hand in hand with our people, with our IT department and making sure that lab access and doing what's necessary to make sure that people don't fall through and not get the needed resources, so it's such an important combination between the Disability Resource Center and A triple C.
Of course here's a few things on our roles in our committee for providing that partnership. We have the DRC, with Roxana is here. Me and Mansha who is also our media conversion specialist here on campus all working together for the Disability Resource Center, but at the same time we meet on a monthly basis with our IT department for access. Including Cynthia who is the assistant director in ACCC, Mark Goedert who is the small systems LAN manager and Sarah here who I work with a lot, who is officially a research programmer.
So we meet on a very frequent basis to ensure that technology is necessary. I mean I've seen so many times when we're working together that if there's something that comes up, if there's some kind of assistive technology or some problem, we try to do ‑‑ we do the problem solving technique as well as trying to like to be proactive, trying to think of new ways of incorporating assistive technology in the labs.
>> SARAH YU: It's probably good to note that the DRC partnership started sometime around fall of 2007. That's when we started meeting together on a monthly basis. And it really helps our group, the ACCC to know the kind of issues that students are experiencing, having that collaboration with DRC, because they are the firsthand who get information from the students what they actually need, where they need it, and what the problem is, so that's kind of give birth to this partnership where we meet once a month, we discuss different issues, we proceed with what course of action we can take to improve the lab environment and to provide what students like Peter would need on a daily basis.
So the goal of our partnership is to improve on the current state of our lab environment. We want to make students aware that there's resources available for them and we want to make the computer lab as accessible as we can.
>> KEVIN PRICE: I want to tell one story. Recently, it's amazing that our partnership, because the other day we needed some student had ‑‑ there was an assist ‑‑ there wasn't assistive technology available in an area that a student was using, and ACCC, talking with Sarah, it was like that afternoon, we solved the problem and had assistive technology over where it needed to be, so it's that kind of partnership, that kind of communication that's so vital to make sure that it would not be two weeks from now. That student needs access to that material or that course within, you know, really quick. Semesters are so fast and we work very hard to make sure that when there is a problem, that we move on it quickly, and that's such an important part of our partnership.
>> SARAH YU: So so far, since we started working together, what we have accomplished are the following: We have improved on the policy statement, which haven't been changed since, I don't know, 2007, so since we met, then we have updated that policy to state what are the things that we promise to provide our students, what are the things that you can expect from ACCC.
>> KEVIN PRICE: I thought you said it was 1997.
>> SARAH YU: Oh, 1997, I think. 1997 is when the last policy was drafted, and then since we started meeting, we drafted a new policy in 2008.
We improved the signage that is available in our work stations. With the help of Mansha, she helped us to create Braille signs which we apply on our work stations to students who are visually impaired can find the stations where they have the accessible software. We also posted signs that are visual available like on the walls so there is increased awareness of where they can go to get these applications.
We also have the brochure that DRC have put together, and it includes all information about where you can get applications such as jaws, zoom text, dragon, and (inaudible) well and so on line we have the accessibility resource website, which we have the mappings of all the labs and all the stations that you can go to to take advantage of this software.
>> KEVIN PRICE: And like I said, like Peter mentioned, we try to integrate it right into the labs so students are right beside their peers. It's knot a special lab they ‑‑ it's not a special lab they go to. It's right there. They sit side by side with their peers where they're working with their assistive technology on the computer systems that they need.
These are some of the ‑‑ always the challenge is that we're still working on, but including continued when there is software compatibility, but I think that has increased recently with the newer versions. You don't have as many software incompatibility. Zoom text, vista, magic. Some ‑‑ sometimes the worst part in my experience has been licensing sometimes with having different licensing issues with their keys or some software keys that we have to sometimes reinstall, but besides that, we really have ‑‑ they work together quite a bit to ensure that software is working together in the labs with the standard technology.
Do you want to mention ‑‑
>> SARAH YU: I think information dissemination, that's the thing we want to improve on a lot. There's many things available, but it's not being passed on to students. There's many issues students have that we don't know, so that's open communication is something we need to work on, open channel where we can really know what student needs and that's where DRC really comes in. They help us to know what we can do on our end so that we can make our labs available for students.
>> KEVIN PRICE: Yeah. And one thing recently, we signed up a website ‑‑ I mean a web e‑mail list of all the students that if there's something needed in a lab or if they ‑‑ if there's a problem with the lab, we can send an e‑mail out to the students, necessary, if there's a new version of a software, so a lot of things are being improved now that we taken the e‑mail list of all the students who ‑‑ and make sure that it's not ‑‑ they don't ‑‑ they'll see other students. It's very ‑‑ they don't see other students. They only get the e‑mail for themselves, not a list of the other students.
>> SARAH YU: So we meet once a month, every last Thursday. If there's any students or staff or faculty who want to join our meeting, we do meet every last Thursday for an hour and we discuss current issues that are out in the lab. We try to find out what are the newest versions of applications, we develop them and so we can deploy them on our lab machines. We do have very limited licenses, so that's why we have a few stations that we designate as accessibility software, machines that have accessibility software, which we deploy and if needed we move a student. We have something deployed in the residence hall. It was needed in the school of public health. We switched the need from the residence hall to the school of public health for the student who was working in school of public health so that the student could have access to zoom text and we did that in seven days.
>> KEVIN PRICE: One thing that they did for us, we asked one time, making sure that the web accessibility tool bar, you might have heard of it, that's the tool bar for web accessibility and I just talked to Sarah and some people at ACCC, and within a week they had every single lab set up so the web accessibility tool bar was in the image, so now anybody who goes to any of the machines on campus can have access to the web accessibility tool bar. That was part of our partnership to be able to do something like that. And make it fast, make it so it's not like we have to go through all the bureaucracy to make that happen. We made it happen within ‑‑ it wasn't very long. I think it was like a week or two or something like that.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is that the one for IE or the one for Mozilla.
>> KEVIN PRICE: We used the one for IE, I think. I think we did IE.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: There's also one ‑‑
>> KEVIN PRICE: I remember the IE one.
>> SARAH YU: Kevin is the one who is telling us what we need to put out there.
>> KEVIN PRICE: I think we did both but I'm pretty sure we did the IE one. We'll have to check on the Mozilla.
>> SARAH YU: I'm not sure.
>> KEVIN PRICE: You have the Mozilla.
>> SARAH YU: Okay so we have that monthly meeting. We do have tracking, problem tracking database so we can keep track of what we have done so far, what we need to do, so that keeps us in order of the things priority and what can be put backward, like magic.
Well that's in the future. We're hoping to have magic deployed on our printing stations. That's one of the things that students are complaining that when they finish their job they can't print because they can't manipulate the printing station so that's one of the things that we're working on, to have magic installed on the printing stations so they can actually go and then get their print job released.
So vision?
>> KEVIN PRICE: Our vision is more, you know, including universal design, more things going that we're integrating the assistive technology in the lab so you can go to any machine on campus. One thing recently we did was everyone heard of the free software, SA to go, there's a free speech output program that a lot of people use and we put an icon on all the desk tops with a hot key so if anybody wants to go, is it control alt S or R? They can get the screen reader to come up on the stations so the idea is to come up to any station, any work station on campus, and be able to have access. That's not ‑‑ it's something for the future. It's a dream of ours but we're trying to do little things along the way, and make sure it's in the image, in the accessibility, like making sure you can get on the Microsoft tools accessibility tools on any station. That's an important thing that we want to make sure is a universal design issue. And we want to make sure that all labs on campus, all the computer labs, ACCC computer labs, that the technology is accessible to our students.
That's it.
>> SARAH YU: That's a few things that we did, but I know Mr. William and Mr. Ed has much more to offer to our students, so we're going to give the floor ‑‑ okay.
(Applause.)
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: Hi, my name is Bill Bielawski. I work at the Chicago Lighthouse for the blind. I've been there for about four years but my interest in working with people who are visual impaired is 24 years old. My daughter was born blind. And actually I met Ed Vitu probably 23 years ago. Shortly after I found out my daughter was blinds, I was working at lucent technology and I searched out a blind employee who was in my department and after I was talking to her, Ed came walking in with a cart load of equipment to help the person with her workplace. Naturally being a part of AT&T, they have deep pockets so whenever we wanted, she got. So I met Ed 23 years ago.
And you haven't changed a bit.
(Laughter.)
You have this handout. So I'm not doing a Power Point. I just decided to walk through the handout.
And again my talk is just about equipping students who are blind or visually impaired for college. When I use the word blind it's legally blind, so 20 over 200 in one eye. All the way to total blindness. Visually impaired is things that are less than that, where you still need magnification and there's some definitions that say even if you're 20 over 60 in your best eye, that's where vision impairment starts, so 20 over 60.
There's my contact information. The Chicago Lighthouse is on Roosevelt and Wood. Probably not even a mile from here.
I didn't think I killed it. I was just trying to scroll down.
Okay. And just about all technology, there's well over somewhere between 500 and a thousand products for folks who are blind or visually impaired around the world but most of them could be categorized into these 12 categories. So desktop, what I have here are 12 tops and then in ‑‑ 12 types and then subtypes. Some have CRT monitors. Some have other monitors. There's things called luggable video magnifiers. Once you put things with a flat panel LCD monitor then you can lug them around, and that's one of the examples that I have here. So this is a luggable CCTV. So the camera now is a security camera, that's what's in the box and you always need a monitor, and so they just attach the monitor to a flat panel monitor, and it's luggable. The camera folds behind it and then the monitor folds down and there's a handle build into the base and so you can carry this with you from class to class. And so some of my ‑‑ at the lighthouse, besides evaluating clients and helping them find the right solutions for work we handle college students, a lot of referrals from the Department of Human Services. So this is an example of what I call luggable video magnifier that folds and there's another type of luggable where again they give you the camera free and you can carry that around but you need a monitor wherever you go.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: So what do you do with that?
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: Okay. I'm glad you asked.
So again the old name is closed circuit television because my daughter's first one was indeed a television camera mounted on a stick, connected to a monitor, you know, hard wired to it, so that's where it got its name, like closed circuit television. Nowadays it's a security camera. And so you just put the paper underneath. This guy's been acting up today. Actually I loaned this out to somebody and I have a feeling that they did something nasty to it because today it's been malfunctioning.
It's doing some initialization. So you put the paper underneath it, and then just move the paper underneath it. For some reason, you know, like I said, I think this one's been damaged by the client that I loaned it to. It was working in the exhibit hall but now it's not.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay.
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: All right. So again make it whatever size you want and then move the material underneath it. It could also do reverse read. Most people would use it would use it in this mode because same reason we're told not to sit close to a television it's true. This is a lot nicer on your eyes. There's black and white and color. One of the problems my daughter had when she was in school is she had Monday oculars so to look at the board she had a telescope. She had to look at the board, and then write it down.
Nowadays you can do this.
(Laughter.)
Okay. I need your signature, so ‑‑
(Laughter.)
And so if my daughter had this technology going to school would have been a lot nicer because she could have followed on the blackboard. There's some devices when you hook this up to a computer where not only can you look at the blackboard or whatever, you can capture the (inaudible) and then blow it up with your favorite editor later on.
So that's a luggable video magnifier. Again and this is what I call the folding kind.
Portable video magnifiers. This is kinds of an example of one. Where again it's just a camera that you have to connect to ‑‑ in this case you have to connect it to a computer or you can again sometimes connect it to a television or a monitor. So this is very light and portable. You can carry it with you in a backpack.
That's portable.
There's hand‑held video magnifiers, so you always need a camera and you need a monitor. And so that's what's in here.
Rather than show you photographs, we'll show you the actual gadgets, and so you just carry this with you, move it over the material, and again it works well and so that's what I meant by hand‑held. Again there's dozens of different models in each of these categories, and I have quite a few of them in the lab.
OCR systems. Okay. And that's what this guy is. But I don't think I have time to show. For those who visited my booth, this is called the zoom twist, it has a security camera hanging if you're doing distant stuff. But this camera is a regular digital camera so rather than scanning in the document, I'm sure here you've scanned in on a flatbed scanner, and then read them electronically, this takes a picture and stores that image and then OCR's that picture. You can scan things in as quirk as you can turn pages. So scanning in a book which meant mashing in the book, you buy one of these and it has a book mode. As fast as you flip the pictures it's take the pictures and collating them.
Again I'm not going to take the time to show it.
So that's accessing print. So everything I've shown you up to now is how somebody would access print and again the OCR systems talk to you. So besides once it takes the picture it reads it to you.
Okay access to digital information. We talked about screen reading software. Again I'm not going to show you jaws or window eyes or zoom text. Hopefully you came to my booth or the other ones and you've seen it will have.
Ed's going to show you Braille displays. But what Ed is going to show you an embosser, I'm going to show you a Braille display.
Window eyes, besides talking to you will also then run this as an example of a Braille display. So this is 32 cells. Sometimes called refreshable Braille display, sometimes called a dynamic Braille display, so whatever window eyes or jaws is saying or voice‑over in case you're a Mac user, whatever you're using is displaying here. And again as you can tell, this one is USB. They also come with Bluetooth. This one doesn't have a Braille keyboard on it but they also come with Braille keyboards.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is it going across or does it come up (inaudible)?
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: The 32 Braille cells and it raises the pins for whatever it wants to display, and then as you scroll through the document, you know, it's changing what's on the Braille display.
They come in different sizes. They come up to 80 cells down to as small at 12 cells. They're very expensive. This device is over $2,000 and it's because the Braille cells are made by hand. There's no machine anywhere that can put Braille cells together. They're complicated so they're made by hand.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you have to cover that with all your fingers?
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: It'll be there and you slide your fingers across. Just like you read Braille on hard copy. Just slide your fingers across. The buttons at the end are controlling buttons so when you hit the end you hit the button. There's actually a European model that knows where your fingers are at and when you get to the end of the line it advances automatically. Of course it costs $15,000. The Bluetooth models of this will talk to your cell phone, computer, and net books. The net books are these mini PCs, I think they're going to take over. But again for total Braille user, you get a Bluetooth Braille display and the Braille keyboard and whether it's your cell phone, your PD A or whatever, you sit with this on your lap and it will link to wherever you are and to your whole house.
Again Braille printers, again that's what Ed is going to show you.
PDAs, Ed will show you the example of the subcategory called the note taker, so again PDAs you put software, just like jaws is on a laptop, there's mobile speak and other things you put on PDAs and cell phone that make them accessible.
Digital talking books. Before everybody was listening to first big eight track tapes or four track tapes actually and went to CDs and now having digital. This is a digital talking book player. You can get books on your computer on USB and put them in here or these are Wi‑Fi accessible or you can get books over the air and download your favorite book. I have Harry Potter in here now. I also have the Chicago Tribune. Again this is called reader stream and it's 300 bucks. And it's really taken over. For some reason they hit a niche with this product. There's a couple people coming by, but it's very tactile and totally designed.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: How much.
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: You have an SD card and it can do the high density SD cards. So 64 ‑‑ it could hold an infinite amount.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: We have one on campus now. We purchased one for our office for student use.
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: All students should have their own.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: So is that a computer?
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: All my students get them. I also teach the office skills training program. All my students get this, but DHS buys it.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is the voice there computer reading text or is it an actor reading text?
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: You could put just a text file in here and have synthetic speech or you can get a daisy book, even though that is totally recorded in human voice, you put that on here. There's different levels of daisy books. Some are totally human speech, all the way down to no human speech.
So since you asked.
(Demonstrating.)
You can skip forward. Right now it's set to skip forward by page. You can skip forward by paragraph, sentence or whatever.
Now, at every chapter there's a heading and again that's with digital talking books, sometimes referred to as daisy, you can jump from header to header and so within a book like Harry Potter, every chapter is (inaudible) you can navigate through the book quickly.
So that's just a sample of what you can do with digital talking books. GPS systems that will show you the latest in those systems. Cell phones are accessible. Ed will show you a kind of like a really remarkable cell phone.
And there's some household gadgets, bar code readers that have all the bar codes at the grocery store in them and they talk. Other devices that can recognize currency and Ed will show you one of those.
So let me show you what I do ‑‑ what we've done for students. Here I gave you examples of three different students just to give you an idea of their stuff. It's very expensive because they sell so few every year. Blindness is five out of a thousand. So blind vision impaired, 5 out of a thousand. Half of those are over 65, so they're not in school or in the workforce. So it's 2 and a half per thousand that are less than 65 years old. And so it's a very small market. But there's a lot of players in it. And again but this stuff is expensive. So student number one is what could be called a high partial. Like my a daughter. Right at 22/a hundred. And 17 inch laptop, 2 gig, the big keyboard, so the 101 keyboard so you have the full number pad because there's shortcuts and you'd a like your keyboard on your desktop to be the same as your laptop. Visual home premium. A talking dictionary. In this case for high partial, just a USB printer with an all in one scanner built in. Zoom text magnifier reader. Even though this person is high partial, we get dock reader. Zoom text alone and I'm not going to take the time, magnifies on the screen and you ask scroll around. Doc reader on zoom text reformat it and it fits the words to the screen. It changes any page to a Teleprompter or what is called ticker tape, it runs the text just across the ticker tape mode so even if you don't need the reader because of speech, that I always recommend readers and then the zoom twist (inaudible).
Number two is a low partial so this is something who has some vision but is also a Braille reader. Again same 17 inch. USB printer, but in this case we didn't get a scanner. A basic D embosser. It's an embosser made by index. But the characters per second per dollar is the best. A hundred characters per second. The plus tek bat reader. That's a flatbed scanner but it's designed for books. It has a real narrow edge, an eighth of an inch edge so you open up the bookbinding and it's great if you're going to scan in books. And it has all the software like you get with open book or Kurtzwell. Jaw standard, 40 Braille display, the victor reader stream and because this person is a high ‑‑ wants to use their eyes sometimes to use at diagrams or graphs, that a clear view CCTV, or something like that. And that's 14,000 to equip that person.
The third person is totally blind. And it's a very similar arrangement. Again everything is there. It's just the Perkins Brailler and the Olympus digital voice recorder. My daughter when she went to college at College of DuPage, she had just a little Olympus voice recorder, you can probably get them for 50 hours on a lanyard and the teachers wore them. She was in motion picture and television production so you didn't have to convince anybody and she recorded all her classes. She took what notes she could but she listened to every lecture twice. Her classmates once they found out she had this, if they missed the class, they called Jennifer. I advise this for everybody, everybody to record the classes.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: How come the 17 inch, like you were saying, net books and stuff, is there a reason for that size?
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: The 101 keyboard. To get a 101 keyboard you have to have a 17 inch monitor.
Now Ed will show you ‑‑
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I had a question. It seems like in all these devices, you're really going to end up being limited by the length of the batteries. Is that really a problem and what's an average length for like that little hand‑held reader, the one that you showed earlier?
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: This guy?
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah, what's the battery life on something like that?
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: Probably two hours of continual use.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: It's not a whole lot.
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: No it's not. So you're right, anything with a display.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: The product that was like a Kindle product, if you have your text in electronic format and it came in a PDF or an RTF, you can put that in and it'll read the text?
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: Yes.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: It'll skip over the graphics, do that continually?
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: Right. I love kindle except they don't magnify the menu and even the kindle 2 doesn't speak to the menu so they do a great job with the texting size but they're useless to many of my clients unless they magnify the menu. But if you don't know what kindle is ‑‑
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: What is that called? The one that's like kindle?
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: This guy? The victor reader stream. Made by human ware. Costs about the same as the kindle.
>> ED VITU: I'm going to begin by focusing on optical character recognition. And by way of background, Kevin mentioned that I started my business in 1984. Actually I was in the business ten years earlier than that. One of the very first employees of tele sensory system when it was a system, and at that time optical character recognition was done by an individual with a stinger, in a device called an opticon, the size of a book. (Inaudible) you would feel the print going under your finger. That was the start of it, and as I say, that was in the mid 70s. Then in the late 70s, Rick Kurzwell came along and brought optical character recognition within the usability for totally blind individuals. At that time the first Kurzwell reader was about the size of a floor stand copier and ran $50,000. And things have changed over time.
And today we're at the stage where optical character recognition now is accomplished with this device right here. It is a smart phone, made Nokia, but Rick is behind it. The product is called (inaudible) a joint development between Rick and the national federation of the blind, and I'm going to do a brief demonstration here, plugging in the speakers so you'll be able to hear it, and then we're going to take a picture of a page. Get the cord out of the way here.
Oops. Got to turn the speaker on here.
I'm doing this and I'm holding the page in one hand and the camera in the other hand. I've seen totally blind people do this as well once they get used to the product. So I'm going to take a picture of this page.
(Taking picture.)
(Reprocessing picture.)
(Demonstration.)
Okay. We don't want to spend too much time reading that page, but to give you an idea of what else you can do here, you can save what you scanned. The unit has a micro SD slot. It comes with it too, you can buy a card but it comes up to 16 gigabytes nowadays so you can store probably an encyclopedia on there if you want to. Not only can you store and save what you photographed, and recognized, but you can also, with a little creativity, you can take books created on a computer, put them on that card, stick that card back into the reader, and then you have speech access to those books or whatever that you put on those files.
And if you so desire, you can sign up, if you're not already so signed up with AT&T or T‑Mobile, and they give you a little sim card when you sign up. You can pop that card into the reader and make a phone out of it as well.
Now, if that's all you do, then your telephone activities will be limited to dialing in numbers, making calls, receiving calls, and hanging up. If you want access to the added features of a smart phone, then you'll need something ‑‑ earlier Bill referred to mobile speak. They're kind of like jaws for the Symbian phones so you can get one of those programs and have much broader access to what's on the phone.
Now, if a school or college is reluctant to acquire a phone for a school, my goodness, what kind of precedent would that set? There is the option of providing just the software, and let the student get his own phone or a Lion's Club or their parents or whatever. So these are options that you have there.
Now, this device, anybody got any money they're willing to risk on this.
(Laughter.)
Bill had mentioned that it does currency recognition, that we do have something for currency recognition. This device will recognize U.S. currency, and I can demonstrate that briefly here.
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: Do it against the side of the pedestal. The simpler the background the better, the quicker is operates.
>> ED VITU: This is the new software. But if I do this, then I have to ‑‑
(Demonstration.)
So if you really have to get to the pop machine, there's a way to do it.
Okay. Now, I'm sure there's something that I haven't told you about this.
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: You can take voice notes with it, so it's a recorder.
>> ED VITU: Yeah, absolutely, so it has all the features of a smart phone.
Now, there is one limitation that I found. I mentioned mobile speak earlier in talks. There is a version of quick office on this device. Now, you can upgrade that for about a hundred dollars to a read write version. It comes with read only. What I found was however that the talks in mobile speak are unable to deal with the Power Point, Word and Excel components. You can get at the notes, the note taking, so it's kind of like you can have notepad if you will, and if you're going to do that, I would strongly urge you to consider a Bluetooth keyboard, which is available for this device as well. Very nice, compact foldable keyboard, so the student can go around and take notes, read wherever they want and store things and just an amazing product.
>> WILLIAM BIELAWSKI: Wave finder.
>> ED VITU: Yes, if you want to take it a step further, there's a program called wave finder. Then you can add to it. For that we would already have to have talks or mobile speak and then you could use it as your GPS system. Okay?
Now, everybody is wondering how much does that cost. Well, the basic unit, with an N 82 phone, that's the better of the two phones available, runs 1495. Mobile speak is another $300. Wave finder is another $400. The foldable Bluetooth keyboard is about 150, 145. So that gives you some idea there.
Now, I'm going to do one more thing. I'm going to grab the other thing here because I have it set up slightly different from this one.
>> ROXANA STUPP: In the meantime I would like to ask you, does somebody need captioning here in the room?
Thank you.
(End of session.)
