Hardware/ Software For the Visually Impaired

1. Hardware/ Software For the Visually Impaired

2. Hard/Software may be of use to the visually impaired • Braille keyboard/printer (H) • PAC mates (S) • Voice recognition devices (S) • Magnifiers (H + S) • Converters (e.g. Text to sound) (S) • Microphones (H) • Headphones (H) • OCR (S)

3. Braille Printer • A Braille printer is a type of impact printer that can create Braille for the blind on a page. • These Braille printers emboss the text from a computer into a printed output. • The translation program convert scanned text through word processing and program it into Braille. • The ‘cells’ that are used in place of letters on the page are quite big compared to normal text. • So this results in the Braille needing to be printed out on multiple pages.

4. Braille Printer Buttons which allow the user to use the computer e.g photocopy and print. The arrangement of the Braille allows them to see the correct buttons

5. PAC Mate • PAC Mate is the first hand held device that allows

6. Voice Recognition • The benefits of this speech output and voice recognition software is that it enables text to be displayed on a screen to be spoken by a speech synthesiser. It is a very useful tool which benefits the visually impaired as it allows menus to be read out and will enable a visually impaired person to have access to the computer. While speech output software also benefits the visually impaired as it talks to the user, voice recognition software enables the visually impaired to speak to the computer helping them to produce a correctly spelt document. • Voice recognition allows the visually impaired to create documents through speech. However using voice recognition can be a long and slow process. This is because when a visually impaired person firsts uses voice recognition the software’s dictionary may not have a large vocabulary so words will have to be constantly added • The visually impaired also have to speak in the same tone throughout the document