To anyone who's played with an Olympus LS-P5, does it have voice guidance? If so, it looks like an absolutely amazing replacement for the impossible-to-find LS-P4. #Blindness#Accessibility#A11y#Olympus#recorders
I got my first call from someone on the Be My Eyes app that lets the sighted step up for blind & low-vision people today.
I’m a late adopter, having only heard about it this week. You register, & when time permits, you can answer video calls placed by blind app users asking for help seeing, reading, selecting things.
Thanks to the founder, a Danish visually impaired guy himself, for having the idea and going with it; & the people working there now.
It’s not often that a crowdsourcing app lives up to every hope the internet allowed us to cling to. Silicon Valley social media owners talk a lot about ‘bringing people closer together’.
There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness
From Homer to Helen Keller, from Dune to Stevie Wonder, from the invention of braille to the science of echolocation, M. Leona Godin explores the fascinating history of blindness, interweaving it with her own story of gradually losing her sight.
Here's a summary of the great work happening at #harvard (and in other labs) to find a therapy for Usher Syndrome.
I continue to be amazed and impressed by the machine that is science. The work these teams are doing is crazy good - three different types of gene editing and vectors to treat progressive #blindness , based on decades of painstaking, bit-by-bit understanding of cellular and retina biology.
Visual prosthesis development is entering the trough of disillusionment https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle "Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters." #blind#blindness
@freedomscientific#question and #suggestion here. can you add #OpenAI#Bing or #Bard to the sources of image descriptions from the #PictureSmart feature in #JAWS? this picture smart feature is very efficient because on a press of a keystroke, you can get descriptions of image files and controls. except sometime, it provides descriptions that are totally not helpful, for example identifying logos that are really not in the picture. i think it will be grate and much more efficient if these #AI things could be intigrated to this feature. #Blind#Blindness#Accessibility#ScreenReader#JFW
Here is a photo of me taken in front of #Milan cathedral that I've ask LLaVA to describe for me. to my sighted friends, I'll appreciate you giving feedback on its accuracy.
Description:
The image features a man wearing a pink shirt standing in front of a large, ornate building with a blue sky in the background. The building appears to be a cathedral, as it has a tall structure and a prominent clock tower. The man is holding a camera, possibly taking a picture of the impressive building.
There are several other people in the scene, some of them closer to the foreground and others further in the background. They seem to be enjoying their time near the cathedral, possibly admiring its architecture or taking photos as well.
for those who need #image descriptions or #AltText for photos, here is a model that pretty much does it. It is called #LLaVA. I will post a sample image with a description on my next post and let you sighted friends comment on it. 😁
question for #JAWS users and to @freedomscientific as well. when going to the #windows context menu with windows+x, JAWS says "Context Menu. Installed apps. 1 of 18. Alt followed by p".
why does it have to say "alt" when you can just activate an item there using the letter shortcut without the alt key. is it #Microsoft that put alt on the shortcuts there and JAWS just happened to read it?
"Alt followed by p". again, why does it have to say "followed by". I completely understand that this "followed by" thing is used on the shortcut keys on ribbons in Microsoft office to inform the user to press alt and then the letter combination to activate certain items. but in this context, it doesn't apply.
Interestingly, I see no blind people complaining on social media about the lack of progress in visual prosthesis development (retinal implants, brain implants for restoring vision, no invasive devices on the market); #NeuroTech#BCI#blind#blindness