Thursday

We hit the booths first since the first session didn't start until 10:40. I guess the biggest hit to us was the mobile KNFB reader that uses the cell phone with the Symbian operating system such as some of the Nokia phones. We saw him use it and it was pretty cool. While it told where the scanner was taking the picture, he had some difficulty squaring to the page so the right column was cut off. This could be a problem for those who cannot see the paper. We had the pleasure at the breakfast yesterday of sitting by one of my old classmates from Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School (IBSSS), Jim Gashiel. He was six years ahead of me but we still knew each other. I told you that to tell you this, that he is working for the company that sells the mobile KNFB reader. I suggested to him that he try a menu that has a darker paper with black text such as one from the Cracker Barrel. He was curious about that one himself. Anyway, when it reads the text back, it can also be seen in fairly large print on the phone and the words being read are highlighted. I thought that was great! It can be stored in the phone and easily transferred to a computer but it is saved as a jpeg file so you’d need Kurzweil 1000 or something else to transfer that into text. While we probably won’t be getting something like that for our consumers, we are seeing the “accessibility for all” played out although it has a ways to go. The whole thing is about $2,100 now.

We say Ed Christal and his group. It was good to see him. Another product that was pretty good was the Magnilink Student Edition. This is meant to interface with a notebook PC and the camera can be used for reading documents or things far off. I think it does pretty well. It even has it’s own xy tray if you don’t need to be so mobile.

In one of the sessions we both attended we saw the new SenseView Duel which is a new product that GW Micro is releasing. Chris Park and Jeremy Kurry had the session. They first showed the SenseView with the hand writing camera that the Duel. The SenseView only weighs 7.8 ounces and magnifies up to 22x which is the highest magnification that any hand held device magnifies as far as I know and according to them. The screen is 4.3” wide and was the first unit to incorporate the freeze option. It has a battery status light and can last up to 5 hours before re-charging. It also has six different color modes and 4 brightness modes. Many of our consumers have picked this one and it is a good unit. The SenseView Duel takes the SenseView one step farther as they put it in that the handwriting camera is now connected and it can be used for distance viewing as well as close up, although the distance view didn’t look that impressive to me as everything had a pink tint to it and when I tried to change color modes, that made things even worse. He said there would be improvements on that which is a good thing as it wouldn’t be of much use without them. Another cool thing about the SenseView Duel is that you can store 20 pictures or items that have been captured in the freeze frame. You can also zoom them up to 12x. These cannot be transferred to a computer for the reason that students may get the idea of taking a picture of a test and then later selling the answers over the Internet….not that anyone would do that, of course. Magnification on this one goes from 3x to 12x while the plain SenseView goes from 4.3x to 22x. Battery life is about 4.5 hours and it has a 4.3” wide screen. The price will be around $1,299.00 and will be released for market in May.

The other item that stands out is the Bookshare.org session. Bookshare now has about 36,000 titles and is now a free service for students. Anyone taking two hours from a college on up is considered a student. The user must be print disabled and have a signed document from a professional. They are working to have available text books for those in K-12 and college. Already they have books for K-2 with description of the pictures. The Victor Reader software is given to all users so the books can be read in the DAISY format They can be in many other formats as well. Subscription for non-students is $50.00 with a $25.00 signup fee. Books are gotten each month that are on the New York Times best seller list (up to the first ten). If you’re a volunteer you get $2.50 off per book you work on. There is a form that can be downloaded the certified professionals can sign for proof of disability. Many newspapers are on there as well. With the new equipment they now have, a 2” thick book can be scanned in around 5 minutes. That’s fast! They now have 16,000 students from 3,000 when they received the grant on October of 2007. Bookshare can get many of their text books from NIMAC which is a textbook repository. The NIMAC Repository is searchable. Books can be tagged as "adult" content and only 18 and up can download those. They are working on clarification for status for private schools. Images will be included which will be in low resolution by the end of 2008 for text books.
Lisa.f@benitech.org is the presenter’s email address if you have more questions and visit www.bookshare.org for more information.

I also attended a session on scripting for Supernova but most of that was way over my head. I will give a few details for those who may be interested. The scripting program that they use is Lua which is an open source program from Brazil. It is portable so can work on any system. These are really text files with .lua extension. The scripts must be tied to the map files but according to the presenters, about anything you want to script can be scripted.
While it is in the 9.0 version of Supernova on a limited basis, the upgrade which will come in June will be complete with better documentation.

I attended a session by Job Access Network but I’ll include their materials when I get them.

There are so many solutions here that it boggles the mind. We’re collecting lots of material and will do our best to get the material into the hands of those who may want or need it. It’s time to call it a day!