US Company ELIA have been developing the ELIA Alphabet, an alternative to Braille. It is based on roman character shapes and aimed at an older low vision audience. Currently only 1 in 35 severely vision impaired people in the US can read braille with 85% using it predominantly for labelling and note taking.

ELIA claim their alphabet can be learned in under an hour and is much more usable for users with low tactile sensitivty as it can be scaled and relies on familar letter shapes.

The ELIA Life Technologies page has more information.

Project Gutenberg is an effort to encourage the creation and distribution of books in the public domain. It is a fantastic resource for users of screen readers as most books in the public domain can be found there in plain text formats. Gutenberg's text files do have some problems with screen readers though. The text is wrapped at 65-70 characters and paragraphs are separated by a double-line break which causes a synthetic voice to ad pauses at the wrong moments. We can fix these issues by using some handy steps found at lifehacker. Perform the following actions in a program like word or openoffice.org.

Paragraph Marks
1. Ctrl+H opens the search and replace dialog box
2. Tab to where it says 'Find what:' and type in ^p^p. The symbol ^ is pronounced by JAWS as caret and can be inserted by pressing shift + 6 on a US international keyboard)
3. Tab to where it says 'Replace with:' and type in "((New Paragraph))"
4. Tab and OK on 'Replace All'. Paragraphs are now marked

There's been quite a buzz online lately about the ID Omni Mate, about both the benefits and cost. I investigated a few other alternatives to the ID Omni Mate and discovered QR codes.

QR stands for "quick response" and it has a similar function to a bar code but holds more information. They are also optimised for use with mobile phones which in theory would enable a phone with Talks software installed to pickup the labels and read out content.

The Kaywa reader will work on all phones that have Nuance Talks installed. This article includes a QR code containing my phone number at work. On a phone with Kaywa installed you can take a picture of the screen and it should call me!

The ID Omni Mate featured on this site a few weeks ago has been making the news lately. Visual Independence have posted two clips on youtube. The first is from National Nine News and the second from the Today Show.

A pioneering gene therapy trial has helped a blind man to see in a breakthrough that brings hope to millions affected by eye diseases. British scientists have claimed a world first for the revolutionary treatment, which involved a single injection into the retina at the back of the eye.

Read more at The Independent's full article about gene therapy. 

Photo CC by Reyes from Flickr