Dear AccessWorld Editor,
This letter is in response to Deborah Kendrick's June article entitled, Introducing Blind Alive and Eyes-Free Fitness: Fitness Is More Than Meets the Eye.
Yes, Blind Alive and Eyes Free Fitness demonstrate what's possible for personal fitness. The different routines and programs enable anyone with even the slightest interest to pull up a chair and begin working out. Even advance fitness buffs or yoga masters may learn alternative methods to achieve their goals or learn something new.
However, this comment aims to point out another service for the blind to embark on a life of fitness: UnitedInStride.com. Developed by the Massachusetts Association of the Blind and Visually Impaired in 2015, United In Stride is a platform linking visually impaired runners and sighted guides. Why workout alone at home when you can head off onto a trail with a new friend?
I never thought of myself as a runner, rather running was just something I did. After my visual impairment, the simple activity of tying my shoes and heading off for a three-mile run disappeared. Yes, treadmills provide the opportunity to run, but it's not the same as feeling the breeze cooling off your skin, or [having the chance to come] across another runner and start an impromptu race.
United In Stride resolves the treadmill monotony by opening up a world of sighted guide volunteers. If you [haven't run] with a sighted guide or if you know a sighted individual interested in being a sighted guide, the most common guiding methods are a click away.
The platform possesses two weaknesses. The first stems from the number of members. Simply put, we as visually impaired sporting advocates need to reach throughout our communities and urge our [visually impaired] peers and sighted friends to consider signing up. It's free, and you never know who you might meet. The second is more of a personal preference situation. UnitedInStride.com is solely Web-based, so no corresponding app or synchronization with Facebook or Strava [is available]. Though the site is accessible, it's not accessible to a sizable population of users that predominantly rely on mobile device apps or who just do not want to sign up for membership on another website. I received this criticism while discussing [visually impaired] running with a local disability and athletics group, and it's pretty valid.
It's my hope that by increasing awareness of Blind Alive and UnitedInStride, we may demonstrate to ourselves and the greater world the joys and possibilities of visually impaired fitness.
Thank you for your assistance,
Timothy Hornik
Dear AccessWorld Editor,
Deborah Armstrong's letter, published in the June issue, was spot on. She described the issues one has working with a sighted helper: "that green arrow" and "click on the button in the upper right corner." She writes well and has a handle on the irritations of trying to ride this cyber bull without a saddle.
The iPhone book sounds interesting, but in a couple months it's on to iOS 11. Who can ever keep up! Anna Dresner is certainly smart and writes well. But who can keep up? Can't Apple simply develop an iOS every other year? It's the worm in the iPhone.
Thank you
David Faucheux
Dear AccessWorld Editor,
My name is Ella, and I am a legally blind academic. I am writing to ask a question for a couple of colleagues. They are sighted, but wish to develop an app that can be used to read papers (i.e., PDF journal articles) aloud, as a way of keeping up with the literature. I'll paste part of their email to me below:
The basic premise is to come up with a program that is able to read academic papers and translate them into podcasts that could be listened to instead of read. Obviously this is not as straightforward as with most types of text, because there are so many bits of papers that you would not want read (figures, citations, etc.). So, the program would need to use machine learning to discriminate between different parts of the paper and select the ones that you want to have read to you (e.g., you could just listen to abstracts). Ideally this would all be packaged in a slick app that could be used on an iPhone, etc.
Do you know of anything similar? Can you suggest any support for developing such a tool, or do you have any suggestions?
I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Ella
Response from AccessWorld Associate, Aaron Preece
Hello Ella,
From my research, there are apps that can read documents using understandable text-to-speech, but it does not appear that a technology exists that can differentiate between various text elements without prior markup. For example, the apps Capti Narrator and Voice Dream Reader support the reading of documents using text-to-speech. In fact, this page from Voice Dream's website details how someone uses the app to read journal articles; see the review from "Jde05346."
The Victor Reader Stream hardware book reader allows users to hide certain content such as footnotes or page numbers in DAISY format (a markup format for accessible books) if these elements have been indicated in the text. See section 3.6 in the Victor Reader Stream user guide for information on this topic.
It appears that in order to take advantage of such features, the book or article would need to be marked up beforehand; I have not found a piece of software or service that can use machine learning to intelligently markup an unformatted document. That being said, apps such as those referenced above would allow someone who is completely sighted to listen to print material without the need for a screen reader.
