From: Dean Snyder (dean.snyder@jhu.edu)
Date: Mon Apr 11 2005 - 13:28:38 CST
I just talked with a fellow researcher who is blind. He reads Ancient
Near Eastern texts in transliteration on his laptop. Software converts
(imperfectly) these transliterations, one line at a time, into tactile
Braille.
He wants to be able to read cuneiform when it is encoded in Unicode.
Since encoded Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform has 957 characters and 8-dot
Braille has 256 characters, he suggested that the best way to do this is
to simply pass on the actual Unicode code points to the Braille display
so he could read the characters as numbers. (He has an excellent memory
for this.)
Two questions:
1) Is this something the operating systems should provide as part of
their accessibility packages so it would work system-wide and not in just
a few dedicated applications?
2) Other than speech synthesis, how do blind CJK computer users interact
with text on their computers? I can imagine that it would be very hard to
cut, copy, and paste using only speech synthesized audio streams.
Respectfully,
Dean A. Snyder
Assistant Research Scholar
Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project
Computer Science Department
Whiting School of Engineering
218C New Engineering Building
3400 North Charles Street
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218
office: 410 516-6850
cell: 717 817-4897
www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi/
http://users.adelphia.net/~deansnyder/
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