FW: USA: Online book-sharing service for the blind borrows a page from Napster

[jwantz at hpcc2.hpcc.noaa.gov]

Hi,
A number of years ago I had the opportunity to work with a full page I 
thought was produced by AFB.  They were using it for graphics display.  
It took about 35 seconds to display a map--but hey it worked.  I'm 
fairly sure that it could also display Braille.  On OCR, I believe that 
their is a Linux OCR package that uses Fine Engine.  Both k1000 and Ruby 
use Fine engine.  I have a friend who has k1000 and the latest Openbook 
Ruby and he feels that k1000 is slightly better on recognition.  It must 
be something than the OCR engine!

     Jim
On Fri, 15 Mar 2002, Janina Sajka wrote:

> OK. Next problem! <grin>
> 
> Full page braille displays have long been a kind of holy grail that we 
> dream of and can't attain. As things stand, a single line display is 
> horrendously expensive.
> 
> We need a breakthrough. We need two breakthroughs, actually:
> 
> 1.)	Price. Anything we know today says this would go through the 
> ceiling--tens of thousands of dollars, at least;
> 
> 2.)	Complexity. I don't know that we understand how to build anything 
> this complicated and keep it controlled. Current single line displays are 
> already very complicated, mechanically--which is why they're so expensive.
> 
> My conclusion: Were we to make breakthroughs on the above two points we'd 
> want a full page braille display before this kind of unit.
> 
> 
>