Items tagged with Blind

Just over a month ago, we brought you the amazing story of Les Baugh, a Colorado man that spent 40 years as a shoulder-level double amputee as a result of an electrical accident. Through the help of two Modular Prosthetic Limbs, Baugh was able to perform tasks that many of us take for granted like moving his “bionic”... Read more...
Technology is a wonderful thing, particularly when it's used to advance the lives of those who would otherwise never be able to enjoy it. Over the years, much has been done to increase the joy in the lives of those who are visually impaired. Screen readers, Braille devices, and even apps have been designed to enable... Read more...
Sometimes, technology takes the lead in a story, and consumerism falls to nothing. We love stories like that, where technology does more than just reap benefits for a profitable company, but actually goes a long way in improving lives. Georgia Tech has been working up a technological solution to a commonly felt problem, and it's one that we're... Read more...
Comedians often make cracks at banks for including Braille on drive-through ATMs (there are number of valid reasons why they do this), but given the progress made by researchers at The National Federation of the Blind and Virginia Tech, don't assume that the driver in front of you isn't actually visually impaired. While it may seem an unlikely... Read more...
The first thing that popped to mind when Amazon issued its Kindle DX was this: textbooks! The size makes it perfect for using in place of those dusty old books, and we're guessing that most students would much rather lug around a single electronic device versus a sack full of heavy books that they'll only read a page... Read more...
The Reading Rights Coalition, an advocacy group that represents the blind as well as disabled readers, held a protest outside the offices of The Authors Guild on Tuesday. The organization hopes to get the Guild to reverse its stance on the Kindle 2's "Read-to-Me" functionality. The Authors Guild earlier placed a lot of pressure on Amazon.com... Read more...
How about a 80, 160, 320 or 640Gig NAND Flash drive on PCI Express card?  Sounds interesting, right?  What if we told you such a product could hit an amazing 800MB/sec sustained data rate?  OK, so it's an expensive Enterprise SAN type product but great oogly-moogly!  That's some blinding speed.  Salt Lake's Fusion-io is poised to release such... Read more...
When we talk about the horseraces between manufacturers of electronics, we generally only need to concern ourselves with how each one uses the features and pricing of their wonderful shiny toys to get us to whip out our credit cards. One thing we haven't dealt with for a while is a real live shortage of any fundamental component for anything... Read more...
The essential difference between Microsoft and Apple as corporate entities with wildly differing worldviews is being highlighted by the release of Apple's Safari browser for use on Windows machines. Some new users report that they have trouble reading the text on a Safari presented page. No, Safari didn't make you go blind; although eventually... Read more...
If you're blind and have been missing out on the joys of Mr. Bean or The Three Stooges, then IBM has something to show you: a new narration technology that reads metadata and tells users what's happening on a compatible video clip. Nyuck-nyuuck! "The tool, which works with Microsoft's... Read more...
Some of you may have not even thought about it, but the internet is used by many blind folks each day. Special software that has been developed is able to verbalize what most of us are able to see on the screen. Target's site however, isn't able to work properly with the software, and as MSNBC reports, now... Read more...