“Information and Communication Technology has been playing a vital role in my life to overcome my handicap — from study to research, from day-to-day life to job.” — Saji Mathews, a visually impaired officer in a government organisation.
Indeed, this is true for most visually impaired people today. This is the most beautiful era of the human race, where a person can do things with the help of technology that were not possible earlier. Technology has proved to be a boon in the life of persons with blindness. It helps the visually challenged to read, write and perform their daily jobs in the following ways.
Screen Reading Software
Screen reading software using a synthesised voice is the most important development in the history of assistive technology. Software such as JAWS, Window-Eyes and Hal read the information on a computer screen in a human voice. This lets a visually impaired person do everything on the computer like a sighted counterpart: a sighted person operates with vision, whereas a person with blindness does the same by hearing the information and operating through the keyboard. These are paid programs.
Among the free, open-source screen readers, NVDA and SAFA are worth mentioning for Windows — easily downloadable without any licensing issues. There are also built-in screen readers: the encouraging trend is the inclusion of a basic screen reader within the operating system itself. The VoiceOver screen reader bundled with macOS is far superior to the Narrator found in Windows, and Linux now offers the built-in Orca screen reader, which comes with Ubuntu.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
OCR technology has been a great boon for visually impaired persons. Using OCR software and a standard scanner, a blind person can read any printed document — a book, magazine, letter, notice or newspaper. One simply scans the document and uses OCR software. Some OCR tools are designed specifically for visually impaired persons and include text reading in a synthesised voice. Kurzweil, Cicero and FineReader are some examples that help the visually impaired, particularly with print reading.
Magnifiers for Low Vision
Screen magnification software such as MAGic and ZoomText makes life easier for people with low vision. These programs provide various magnification modes and levels going up to 6×60 and more. The screen can be split vertically or horizontally, with one portion showing the actual screen and the other a magnified view of the focus area. Such software also provides colour-contrasting facilities.
Mobile Software
The most exciting development in this field is the emergence of accessible software for communication devices such as mobile phones. Phones have become affordable and offer much more than telephone services, but most visually impaired users could not use features like the address book, SMS, call history or calendar due to the inaccessibility of the tiny screen. Now a number of screen reading and magnifying apps are available for a wide range of phones, letting even a completely blind person use every feature of the device. This has contributed greatly to the empowerment and independent living of visually impaired persons, who no longer need to depend on friends and colleagues to store phone numbers and addresses.
Smartphones let the visually impaired do even more: use GPS, record meetings and lectures, create text files, and listen to favourite books or songs on the move. Examples include Talks and Mobile Speak (Symbian), Mobile Speak Pocket and Pocket Hal (Windows Mobile), Talk Back (Android) and VoiceOver (iPhone). All these products offer screen magnification and colour contrasting for low-vision users and support a number of Braille displays.
Voice Recognition
Among voice-recognition products, Dragon NaturallySpeaking marks a great improvement in this technology. It claims to be 99% accurate and up to three times faster than typing by hand. It allows you to dictate and edit in Microsoft Word and Excel, Corel WordPerfect and virtually all Windows applications. You can even dictate into a handheld device when away from your PC, or use a Bluetooth microphone. This is extremely useful to people with loco-motor disabilities who cannot type efficiently on a keyboard.
Digital Books
Computers play a big role in the production of digital books today, helping visually impaired people access and procure books easily:
- Braille book production: the computerisation of Braille book production is now an accepted method all over the world.
- Talking books: digital recording provides innumerable benefits; talking books recorded on a PC and stored on CD are becoming common.
- E-text: screen reading software on a PC becomes an excellent reader of electronic text, which is easy to produce and distribute among persons with blindness or print disabilities.
- Large print: electronic text can be viewed as large print on a PC, made easier by the large-font facility.
These books are available in DAISY, RTF, PDF, ePub and other formats.
Other Assistive Devices
A number of assistive devices are available for persons with blindness — a talking watch, Braille watch, talking thermometer, talking calculator, talking weighing machine and liquid-level identifier are some examples. These devices make the life of a person with blindness very easy and comfortable.