An Award-Winning Project: Making the Visually Impaired Read Text Messages
From: ABS-CBN.com - 01/15/2005
By: Raoul Rizal Reyes

A quartet of electronics and communications engineering students at De La
Salle University in Manila have developed a mobile phone application that
allows visually impaired users to read text messages, which earned the group
second prize in the collegiate level of the Sibol Award in the Department of
Science and Technology's 2004 National Invention Contest, as well as the
"most promising invention award" from the Filipino-Chinese Chambers of
Commerce. Presently, blind people can only retrieve text messages on mobile
phones via voice recognition, which can be especially frustrating when
hearing different accents or reading condensed text messages. Being hearing
impaired as well as blind is an added disadvantage, and the researchers'
prototype is even more helpful in such situations, according to De La Salle
student Alexander Tabac. The students' Short Messaging Service (SMS) for the
Blind Using the Braille System, which exists separate from the phone, enables
text messages to be read from the phone inbox and converted into a
refreshable Braille format. The system boasts four functional buttons - Menu,
Enter, Prev (Previous), and Next - that can be discernible to blind users as
unique tone alerts and to blind and deaf users as Braille. The menu command
supports three functions: The reading of text messages from phone memory, the
display of art via ASCII, and automatic new message alerts in Braille and via
ring tones. Tabac notes that the refreshable Braille display permits 14 out
of 150 characters to be displayed at one time; pressing the Next button moves
the display to the next message line when more than 14 characters are
received, while the Prev button returns to the previous display. "We
realized, in moving toward [this] research, that we would acquire additional
technical knowledge and also create a social impact for the visually impaired
community," says Tabac. 

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http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?section=SCIENCE&oid=66684