Archive for January, 2009
A Library In Your Pocket
Have you heard of the Victor Reader Stream? Well if you haven’t then you’re in for a real treat today! The Victor Reader Stream is a handheld portable device that lets those who are blind or visually impaired to read books, listen to music and read text files. This compact little device really packs a punch!
For starters, the Victor Reader Stream is the first piece of portable hardware that allows the blind to read the DAISY book format, along with books from Audible.com, and digital material from the Library Of Congress. The device also supports standard MP3 files, as well as WAV, and WMA audio formats just to mention a few. Besides the audio book reading capabilities, the device also supports voice recording from a built-in digital voice recorder.
The Victor Reader Stream stores and accesses everything from standard secure digital cards, the same that you would buy from any electronics outlet. Besides being able to read books from Audible.com and other resources, the device also supports the reading of plain text, RTF, and HTML files. These files are read by the Victor Reader’s built-in speech synthesis, thus making the Victor Reader Stream the most versatile, portable device for the blind and visually impaired. The Victor Reader Stream supports SD cards as high as 16 gigabytes, thus giving the user plenty of storage space for books, recordings and documents, thus making it the perfect educational and vocational tool around.
So who makes the Victor Reader Stream? None other than Humanware of course! Check out the Victor Reader Stream at the following address here below.
This handy little device will make school and work a breeze because no longer will you have to tote huge numbers of school books inside a backpack on your back, thus causing back pain and discomfort, and for the blind reader, carrying large numbers of Braille books simply isn’t very economical, not to mention comforting.
For the employee, having access to readily available information at the push of a button makes productivity much more enhanced, plus it also improves on overall productivity levels because you have it all right there with you in one simple, easy to use device. Use your Victor REader Stream to record lectures, mettings, or whatever you want with the built-in digital voice recorder.
On an 8 GB SD card, you can store at least 850 hours of digital recordings! Now that’s real power in a small package! On that same size card, store thousands of texts and literature, as well as buisness information, plus have at your disposal, hundreds and hundreds of audio books, all right at your fingertips from this easy to use simple device.
The Victor Reader Stream makes working and learning fun and enjoyable. So do yourself a huge favor and check it out at the above address.
When Touch Doesn’t Work For The Blind
Stevie Wonder: Touch-screens alienate blind
Motown icon, advocates encourage CES vendors to consider blind needs
By Sinead Carew
Reuters
updated 11:32 a.m. CT, Fri., Jan. 9, 2009
NEW YORK -
The craze for touch-screen gadgets, sparked by Apple Inc’s popular iPhone, is raising worries that a whole generation of consumer electronics will be out of the reach of the blind.
Motown icon Stevie Wonder and other advocates came to the world’s biggest gadget fest, the annual
Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, to convince vendors to consider the needs of the blind.
Wonder told a CES event that his wishlist included a car he could drive — which he acknowledged was
probably "a ways away" — and a Sirius XM satellite radio he could operate.
"If you can take those few steps further, you can give us the excitement, the pleasure and the freedom of
being a part of it," said the famed musician.
Wonder said some companies had managed to make their products more accessible to the blind, sometimes
without even meaning to. He cited an iPod music player and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry as gadgets he
likes to use.
Advocates argue that if product designers take into account blind needs, they would make electronics that are
easier to use for the sighted as well.
The good news is that manufacturers do not need to put large sums of money into making products
accessible, nor would they have to forsake innovation, said Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the National
Federation For The Blind.
"We don’t want to hold up technological progress," he said. "What we’re saying is, think about the interface
and set it up in such a way that it’s simple …. The simpler you make the user interface of a product, it’s going
to reach more people sighted or blind."
Touch screens
With the popularity of touch screens, once simple products such as televisions and stereos have become
difficult for blind people to use as they often require navigation of multiple menus that need to be seen to be
used effectively.
"That’s an increasing problem with new digital devices. It’s easy to add feature after feature that’s buried
under menu after submenu," said Mike Starling, chief technology officer of National Public Radio, which is
working on accessible options.
Manufacturers have been putting touch screens in everything from calculators and watches to computers and
music players.
Sendero Group President Mike May, who is blind, joked, "Can I ski 60 miles an hour downhill? Yes. Use a flat
panel microwave? No." Sendero makes GPS navigational devices that have an audio output for the blind.
There are also screen readers that give an audio reading of a phone’s menu. But Anne Taylor, director of
access technologies at the National Federation for the Blind, says they do not yet help her to use a touchscreen
phone.
She said the ability to use a device without needing to look at it could help sighted people who are driving or
older people whose eyesight is starting to deteriorate.
While blind users can buy screen-reading software for $300 upward, it tends to only work on certain phones,
often the most expensive smartphones. Sendero said accessible technology is often expensive, and about 70
percent of the U.S. blind population is unemployed.
Taylor is using CES as a forum to present vendors a set of suggestions for product design that she sees
benefiting both sighted and blind consumers.
For example, manufacturers could include an easy-to-use start-over button, different sounds for different
menus, and controls with good tactile feedback.
Progress
Ahead of the show, there were some signs that vendors, while unlikely to give up on the touch-screen trend,
may be more ready to consider consumers with disabilities.
Developers at Google Inc are working on ways to make touch-screen phones, including those based on its own
Android mobile software, usable for blind people.
National Public Radio announced a special radio receiver technology and software that would connect a digital
radio to a dynamic Braille generating device. It has also created special digital radio channels for readings of
the day’s newspapers.
Dice Electronics has made a prototype radio that incorporates the NPR technology, and NPR’s Starling hopes
this will become a commercial product in 2009.
Starling has also set up meetings at CES with other manufacturers in the hope they will include NPR’s
technology. He said responses to requests for information, which often go unheeded, are much more active
this year.
Some manufacturers could use their production facilities to make such devices, as demand weakens for more
mainstream products in the economic downturn, he said.
"I think in general there may be a view that accessibility may be becoming the new green," said Starling.
Turn Your MP3 Player Into An E-book Reader
It is always in my best interest to find quality resources for the BOSS program, and this post is no acception. Today, I have two really great web sites that can help you to convert text, word and pdf documents into MP3 format.
Now the question may be, why would I want to do that? Well for starters, it allows for you to read your documents without being tied to your computer. You see, you can now turn any MP3 player into an E-book reader quite easily and affordibly. A matter of fact, you can do it all for free! Here are the web addresses below.
http://vozme.com/index.php?lang=en
Now you may have to sign up for these in order to create files, but the signup process is free. Also both of these sites are speech friendly and do work great with screen readers. So take your text based e-books and turn them into spoken word, and turn your MP3 player into an audible e-book reader!
Note To Those Using The Victor Reader Stream
If you have one of these special devices, MP3 books work great on it. You can navigate the MP3 file just as easily as a traditional book on the device. So do yourself a favor and check out these two unique resources, and begin using them to educate yourself, or simply to have fun with your reading.
Working Towards Convention
Will BOSS be at this year’s American Council of the Blind Convention in Orlando Florida? Who knows, but it is possible. If you’re an ACB member, then this may be the news that you want to hear because if it all works out, Jeff and Lori, along with myself and my fiance may end up at the 2009 ACB convention in Orlando Florida promoting the BOSS program.
One of our members, Keith Bundy is going to work out the details with Lori and Jeff concerning them speaking at this year’s convention. So what does this mean for BOSS? Well it means a great deal because it will be our second biggest promotion. Our first promotion was when we were getting ready to start BOSS, and I sent out e-mails to all the chapters of ACB, and NFB.
Going to this year’s convention in Orlando will be a huge milestone for the BOSS program, provided that everything works out like we want it to. However, this is all still in the works, so we’re not sure if it is even going to happen just yet. There are many details that must be worked out until everything is finalized.
However, in the meantime, our 2009 promotional campaign is still going on. I plan to give each and every BOSS member a copy of our promotional CD so that they too can become a vital part of the promotion. There’s lots of work to be done in this promotion, and that’s my job to insure that this promotional campaign goes as smooth as possible, and that our program gets the recognition that it deserves.
As Jeff and Lori do their part in promoting the BOSS program, I too will do my duties in this as well. My job in this is to locate other organizations that cater to the blind and visually impaired. I have crafted a basic e-mail that I use for e-mail promotion to these agencies, and it seams to work pretty well. I have gotten a few responses from it, so I will continue to use it.
What makes this entire promotion thing so exciting is our brand new membership site which the BOSS program is so dependent upon. Without this new site, the BOSS program as it is known today wouldn’t be in existance. We needed this site to make the managing of the program that much easier for those who are responsible for running and managing it.
Not only that, but this new site makes the program look that much more professional than our first site did. Our first site, though it was quite simplified, had its purpose, but it was time to advance further and use something that was more reliable and more professional.
Now when I promote the program, I am pleased to take people to our information page which is on our site. The new site is what prompted me to create our promotional package in the first place. So now that we have our promotional package, it can be used to spread the word about our program. This promotional package alone makes the promotion of BOSS much easier.
Of course, there’s lots of work to be done when it comes to promoting a program such as this. All those e-mails to send, promotional packages to send, and live promotion such as what Jeff, Lori and myself will be doing in Orlando, provided that it all works according to plan.
These are very exciting times because this is our second year this coming July. That’s right, BOSS will be 2 years old. HOwever, from all that we have learned, you would think that we’re actually much older than that, but it is all due to the fact that our members work so hard, and they’re focused and determined to make their successes work.
We’re moving fast and we will continue to do so so as long as there are people who are willing to take action and do what is required of them. By going to Orlando this year, we will be able to show people just what our program is all about. Hopefully we will get people excited and want to learn more about what we do. Ultimately, we would love to get even more members into our program. Isn’t that the reason why we plan to go to Orlando in the first place?
If you’re a BOSS member reading this, then picture this in your mind. Imagine that it is Monday morning, the first day of the convention, and the general session has already begun. You listen to a couple of speakers from other agencies and companies, and then the president of the American Council gets on the microphone and announces the next speakers, Jeff Wark, Lori Steffen and Donald Brown who are going to talk about their exciting program called the Blind Online Success System.
Ok, now imagine you sitting there in the audience and listening to what we have to tell you about our program. You sit there on the edge of your seat, hanging on every word because you’re excited aboutt this brand new opportunity that will help the blind and visually impaired become successful business owners. The more you hear, the more you want to join the program.
Does this sound like something that you would feel if you were there at the convention? Well it could happen, provided that everything falls into place. However, I can’t promise that this will happen, but since we started quite early, I feel that we stand a chance at speaking there. I will definitely keep everyone posted as what is going on behind the scenes in the planning of this monumental event for BOSS.
2009 Promotion Has Begun In Ernist
Well Happy New Year to everyone reading this post today. I sincerely hope that you have set some realistic goals for this new year, and I hope that you meet them.
Anyway, today I would like to let everyone know that we have begun our promotion in earnest! Currently at the ttime of this writing, we’re doing promotion in two areas. One is the Matilda Ziegler Magazine, which is a publication for the blind and visually impaired that turns 101 this year. BOSS will be featured in the February issue. The magazine comes in several formats such as Braille, E-mail, Podcast, 4 Track cassette, digital Braille, and on the Internet. Click here below to visit the site of the Matilda Ziegler Magazine.
http://www.matildaziegler.org/
The other area of promotion is being done through a web site called, Work At Home Truth, which can be found at;
http://www.workathometruth.com
This site deals with work at home opportunities that are honest and ethical, and BOSS is located in the work at home opportunities section for disabled individuals,and underneath the section that deals with the blind and visually impaired. If you go there, you will see BOSS on the site, along with some of our member web sites shown as examples.
This is only the beginning of what I hope to be a very prosperous year for the BOSS program. Prosperous in that our members make money with their businesses, an prosperous in that we gain new membership into our program. The more that the program is promoted and the word gets out, the more members we will have, and the more successful businesses will be run and managed by blind and visually impaired people.
Let’s make 2009 our most profitable year yet!