chakravyuha

A program to help you to learn shapes using the vOICe.ShapeExerciserInstaller

I visited Ahmedabad to attend a couple of conferences. Namely, the National Conference On Information And Communication Technologies (ICT) and the Access India Convention
This time, I decided to travel by train since the air fair was too expensive. There were a lot of us going to Ahmedabad but most people were going to the convention rather than the CSI conference. I teamed up with Manish and Aman for the journey.

My first challenge was booking the ticket. Manish did the actual leg work. I wanted to avail of the discount for persons with disabilities so I had to get a medical certificate. That in itself is matter for a separate blog post. The certificate did not work so I had to pay the full price. That was not too much though.

Day 1

The journey to Ahmedabad was an “experience” thanks to our fellow passenger who is a marketing executive with a large Japanese firm. He was a fat man who had his own assumptions about the world. For instance:
A. IT professionals do no work, have no pressure and are well paid.
B. Everyone likes answering his questions and is his best friend.
C. He is superb at making relationships.
D. A man’s worth is measured by the number of phone calls he recieves on his mobile phone.

Needless to say, he was a frustrated man and had apparantly never been tought to keep quiet. I wonder how he managed in school.

Thanks to our fellow passenger, we went to bed at 20:00 after an excellent dinner. I managed to finish a novel since it was on my mp3 player.

Day 2

We reached on time and our hostess sent a friend’s son to recieve us. He was an example of the typical Indian yuth who is trying to find his feet. In due course, we reached our destination.

The Ritz

Our hostess had more than laid out the welcome mat. No red carpet but the wooden floor was unique and we could not ask for anything more. Towels, soaps etc., were plentyful so was privacy and anything else we wanted. Breakfast that day was of south Indian food. Ouch! However, it was well made so I did not have a problem.

The conference was good though the first half could have been better spent having some more sessions instead of multiple inogeration events. Aman had carried food / snaks so we were able to cope effectively with some of the yon inducing sessions. The evening was action packed consisting of a visit to Gujarat university where we had excellent coco and a “maska bun” and then dinner with a friend. Along the way, Aman tried shopping for clothes in a streat market with Manish and me in toe. That attempt, for no fault of ours failed.

Day 3

The second day of the conference was fascinating with presentations from the National Institute of Design, the Centre For Developing of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Manish and yours truely. There were several other presenters of course. We left the conference early and eventually landed up at a place that served Saurashtran cuisine. It was not sweet for one though I can’t quite remember anything distinctive about the taste. The setting though was interesting since we were in a open air restaurant with bamboo structures. We had to assent a cross between a staircase and a ladder to get to the top of the structure. We were seated on rugs around a stone table. Ug, anyone remember the second book in the Narnia series?

Day 4

The Access India convention was enogurated with a fanfair of access technology. My favorite session was the one with Tina, the image consultant. The agenda was varied but the majority of the sessions were very useful. I had my own demonstration of J-Say in the afternoon from where, I was promptly kidnapped by my uncle and his charming daughter.

Day 5

We packed at night and we were all ready much before time. Shanti Raghavan of href=”http://www.enable-india.org/”>Enable India was undoubtly the star of the morning.

Day 6

The trip back was uneventful except for a fellow deligate being left behind at Alwar. There were a lot of us in the coach and there was a lot of stimulating conversation.

Conclusion

I would repeat this experience anytime. Manish and Aman are excellent friends and traveling companions. The speakers at the CSI conference were varied so one’s interest did not have much of a chance to flag. The Access India conventtion was one of those rare conferences where one is glad that there is no choice of what session to attend. A few points though;
1. The Access India convention must have been the only conference where deligates had to be asked to keep quiet. If the Indian blind cannot behave in a conference, then the corporate world is indeed far away for them.

2. The local organization could have been better and from what I hear, could have provided better residential facilities.

3. We should have made better recording arrangements.

A sound scape of the box of spicesThis image shows a box of spices. There is one big box and every individual spice is kept in its own box. You will be able to sense the different circles belonging to different boxes.

Wheel valves for the uninitiated

A picture of pipes and veal valves on my terrace. These valves resemble miniature steering wheels. They are used to control the flow of water A overhead tanks to my house.

A water tank and it’s associated down take pipes

Sound scape of water tankThis image is of a water tank on top of my house and it’s down take pipes. This was the first image I took using the latest version of the vOICe and my Nokia E51.

Terrace panorama

A view of the Street facing my house. This photograph has been taken from my terrace. The image is extremely complex because it shows a variety of vehicles and I suspect, parts of people.

Side view of car

This image shows the view of the side of a car. It has been taken from the backside passenger window of an other car. I have used the vOICe to take this image. You can clearly hear the doors of the car. I suspect most of the image is of the part of the door that is just below the passenger windows of the car.

Soundscape of an autorickshaw

The image below shows an autorickshaw from the side. You can clearly make out the dividing bar between the back and front halves. For more information on autorickshaw’s, see the following link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_rickshaw

A soundscape of the same image can also be downloaded here. I took this image using my Nokia E51 with the very latest version of the vOICe. Again, I was looking out the left side passenger window of a car.

Soundscape of a complex street scene.

Above is a complex street scene captured at a red light. There are a number of vehicles visible in the image.

I took a look at the HCL MiLeap ultra mobile PC. The screen is just 7 inches wide and the keys resemble those of a calculator. The PC is similar in size to those fat exercise books one used to carry in school. I am not talking about registers here but those fat books between small copies and large registers. You can’t really feel the weight of the machine. I even tried installing a screen reader namely Jaws for Windows on it. The installation took a lot of time but in a brief test, the screen reader behaved as it was supposed to. I then tried the vOICe which was why I was looking at Ultra Mobile PC(s) in the first place. That worked too. All in all, the MiLeap is a good option for any one looking for a light weight laptop. I wish it were smaller so that it could fit into my pocket. The model for Rs. 17500 (approximately) comes with LINUX. You can get Windows XP loaded on to it for a small fee. My tests in the shop were done on a MiLeap Y series laptop which is around Rs. 35000.

I was impressed with the prompt presales service of HCL and the patience of the staff who allowed me to test my programs on their computers.

The commandsI have written commands that J-say enable Microsoft Powerpoint 2003. Please try these experimental commands. Feedback is welcome.

These commands have been created by wrapping the jaws Powerpoint keyboard scripts from the *.jkm file in Dragon Naturally Speaking.

A small j-say utility

I have created a tutorial for the vOICe. A lot of people were having trouble with the understanding of soundscapes and a lot of them were starting with extremely complex images. I walk the reader through certain basic soundscapes and help them become familiar with how to interpret them.

Download the tutorial file by following this link. The name of the file is voicetut.zip.

This tutorial is a work in progress.

In the zip archive, there is an HTML file and a word file. You can open which ever file you like. They contain the same content.

Note:
in the Microsoft Word file, you may find a few embedded sound clips. I’d initially started by using embedded sounds in a word document but realized that this approach was not scalable. The HTML file however contains no such embedded clips.

Update I: The tutorial file is not accessible in the post yet. I am working on fixing that.

Update II: The tutorial file can now be downloaded from here.

At long last, I have added j-say support to Microsoft Access 2003. This project originated in response to a request on the j-say list. Check it out!

Note:
If you need assistance with importing the commands, see the help in the command browser.

Finally, these scripts work with DNS pro v8.1 and Jaws For Windows v7.0.

You can download the commands from here.

I am a regular user of a vision substitution software called the vOICe. It is a free program downloadable from http://www.seeingwithsound.com.

One question that often gets asked is what besides mobility are the practical uses of this program? Which is an indirect way of asking what are the practical uses of vision? Yes, it gives one a lot of ifnormation about one’s environment but what does one do with vision besides moving around? Most other things can be done via other senses so the challenge is to come up with an application which would excite everyone and can be demonstrated in say 5 minutes.

I saw the following post in the KnowBrainer unofficial support forum for Dragon Naturally Speaking
http://forum.knowbrainer.com/read.php?f=2&i=30667&t=30667

You can read the comparison at
http://www.anandtech.com/multimedia/showdoc.aspx?i=2744&p=1

{Warning: URL may wrap.} The comparison is objective and do read the message thread at the link to the KnowBrainer forum. In particular, see Martin Margo’s post on ambient noise.