Sister Ginny in Action
Sister Ginny Quick, of the Ginny's Thoughts and Things blog, recently appeared on WKRN (Nashville, TN) television news. The report is about "remarkable technology" that assists the blind and, in the case of Ginny, helps them help others. You can view the video of the WKRN report by clicking here.
Personally, the technology that Ginny demonstrated was different than what I expected. This is because I once observed the desktop PC of a blind computer programmer in the data center where I used to work, and she had both a Braille keyboard and Braille monitor—which I found fascinating. For those of you who haven't seen one, the way a Braille monitor works is instead of displaying an image on the screen using light, Braille characters are produced on a flat metal surface using metal pins which protrude from it to form characters. These characters are then read by hand—and here are some technical details on various models.
My guess is that the audio/voice-recognition that Sister Ginny uses in the video is a vast improvement over a Braille monitor, although the latter probably continues to have some utility. Anyway, it's nice knowing that there continues to be more and better technology developed which helps improve the lives of the seeing-impaired.
My thanks to the Amon Hen blog for this piece, since that's where I found it...
Labels: Muslim Women, Women's Issues
posted by @ 7:52 AM
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As-Salaamu 'alaikum,
A Braille monitor may be of use to a technical user like a computer programmer because computer programs make much use of punctuation marks, and you need to be able to distinguish one from the other because they will do radically different things. What I saw sister Ginny using was a standard keyboard with a headphone set so that she could hear the words read out by the computer's screen reader. She had one headset for the screen reader and another for the telephone. I think this is what most blind people use for word processing and similar everyday use. Ginny posted a reply to this at her blog here.
Wa 'alaykumu as-salam wa rahmatullah,
Yes, I saw the same equipment that you described in the video, but the reason that I found it intriguing was that it was quite different than what I'd seen in use by seeing-impaired people in the past...not that I'm an expert or anything. You're right that a Braille monitor (more correctly a "Refreshable Braille Display") is probably necessary when programming due to not only having to use punctuation marks, but because one needs to look for syntax errors, etc.—and many of us probably know how tedious that can be.
Another advantage that I see in the technology that Sister Ginny was using is that she was able to keep both hands on the keyboard the whole time, where if she was using a Braille monitor—whoops, I mean "Refreshable Braille Display"—she'd have to keep moving one hand back-and-forth to read it.
Also, I slipped when I called the technology she was using "audio/voice-recognition", since it's actually the opposite of that, since it converts the text that appears on the monitor into audio so that she can hear it in lieu of reading it.
Sister Ginney, in her comments in response to this posting, said that she was unable to comment here due to the fact that I have "Word Verification" turned on. I'm not even sure what "Word Verification" does, so I'll look into turning it off. Quite possibly, the Gestapo-level of security that I now have would still work after being turned down a notch or two...
Deen On...
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