Blind Engineering Student 'Reads' Color-Scaled Weather Maps Using Cornell
  Software That Converts Color Into Sound
From: Cornell News - 01/21/2005
By: Thomas Oberst

Software developed by a team of Cornell researchers enables engineering
student Victor Wong, who has been blind since age seven, to perceive
color-scaled weather maps by translating color into sound. Wong co-developed
the software with undergraduate student Ankur Moitra and research associate
James Ferwerda so that he could read maps of the Earth's upper atmosphere as
part of his doctoral work for professor Mike Kelley in Cornell's Department
of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Ferwerda says the project was
accomplished on a shoestring budget, and he is readying a proposal to the
National Science Foundation to do further research. Critical to Wong's work
is his ability to read tiny changes in an image and ascertain the numerical
values of the pixels in order to develop mathematical models corresponding to
the image. Last summer, Moitra developed a Java program that converts images
into sound, and then introduced a software program that translates pixels of
diverse colors into correlating piano notes; blue is represented by the
lowest notes, while the highest notes represent red. The software can also
read aloud the numerical values of the x and y coordinates, and the value
corresponding to a color at any given point on the image. Wong tested the
software using a rectangular Wacom tablet and stylus to explore images. A
major challenge is determining boundary lines within images, a problem that
the researchers first attempted to solve by printing the lines in Braille and
then laying the sheet over the tablet; they are also developing software that
can perceive major boundaries for printing, as well as eliminate the time
delay between notes. 

http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Jan05/Wong.software.to.html

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Bright Idea
From: AARP Bulletin - May 2005 - page 4

A graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY has spearheaded the
development of prototype software that translates colors into musical notes,
permitting users to "read" colored weather maps with their ears. Victor Wong,
blind since age 7, devised a system in which the 88 piano notes correspond to
colors. Wong hopes his software will one day give the blind access to a wide
array of pictures.