The Internet as Seeing Eye Dog

I’ve long since been unable to read the labels on boxes or cans of food, even with my reading glasses.  The fonts are simply too small and the last few years have seen design trend towards the juxtaposition of background color and font color that lack much contrast.  Black and white isn’t sexy.  Green and yellow apparently is.

I recently wrote about a nifty new device that is essentially a talking camera that attaches to your glasses and then literally reads text, such as would be found on food labels and instructions, to the wearer via a small speaker near the ear.  And while I’d love to have one of those, right now I don’t have $1,500 lying around to buy one.  My work around is actually quite simple, though, and is something most of us do for hours each day.  Browse the Internet.

My two favorite, easy to make, rice dishes are Zatarain’s Yellow Rice and Zatarain’s Spanish Rice.  Each has a different rice to water ratio, as the Spanish Rice also calls for a can of diced tomatoes (I usually spice it up with a jar of salsa), and I can never remember which is which, nor can I even remotely begin to read the instructions on the box.  But, if you’ll Google “Zatarain’s Yellow Rice Instructions” or “Zatarain’s Spanish Rice Instructions”  (which returns distinctly different search results than if you use the term “recipes”), wala:  the instructions from the back of the box that I can then hit Ctrl++, blow it up and find out whether it’s 2 to 1 or 1 ½ to 1.

Just now I put some black bean soup in the slow cooker for tonight’s dinner.  Confronted with the need for 3 cups of chicken broth and a few unreadable (for me) cans in the cabinet, I Googled “small can of chicken broth” to find out that Swanson makes a 14 oz. and a 49 oz. can.  The 14 oz. can holds 1 ¾ cups of broth, so two cans – close enough.

This may seem unremarkable at first glance, but for those of you older than, say, thirty or thirty five, (which I haven’t seen those wonderful numbers in quite some time), did you ever think everything would be digitized and searchable?  Text.  Images.  Music.  Maps.  It’s truly amazing.  Thank you Google and if Sergey or Larry want to stop by for soup….anytime.

Blank Your Monitor + Easy Reading = Accessibility for Low Vision Users of Firefox

Contrast can often be a problem for people with Low Vision.  Most designers of operating systems recognize this fact and build in accommodations. 

Windows has a series of “High Contrast” themes to choose from, and also allows the user to assign colors, sizes, and fonts to different elements of the GUI. 

OS X has a feature where the user can reverse the colors of the GUI.  All white elements become black; all black elements become white, etc.  Apple has extended this reverse color accessibility feature to iOS on the iPhone and iPad.

The problem with this approach to accessibility, which I utilize all the time in Word or Excel, is how it then impacts the user experience on the internet.  When the system colors are set to be reversed, they apply that theme to the internet without discretion.  Photographs and Video suffer the same reversal of colors as text, when in most cases, an ease of reading text is all the Low Vision user is seeking.

A tool I’ve found useful in keeping the graphic part of my internet experience clean while still being able to easily read text in reversed black background with white letters is the Firefox plugin Blank Your Monitor + Easy Reading

Once installed, you just right click on an article and then click “Easy Read” at the bottom of the dialogue box.  A new tab opens up with a black background and all the text from the page in white. 

Fairly easy to read, except for one annoying thing.  Literally, ALL the text on the page is rendered out, including the headers, logins, the follow us on…, captions under pictures, footers, etc.  It can be kind of like those puzzles where you try to find the words vertically, horizontally, and diagonally from a full page of letters (OK, so maybe I’m exaggerating a little).

The current version 1.9 of Blank Your Monitor + Easy Reading was released in October of 2013.  What I’d like to see in a version 2.0 release is some combination of the reader feature in Safari that does just render out the body text and the reversing of colors that is the main accessibility feature of the current app.  But for now, Blank Your Monitor + Easy Reading is a nice little add on to consider if you’re like me and  have trouble reading web pages.

Discovering the OrCam

I’ve been reading The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Andrew McAfee, which I highly recommend (so far) for anyone interested in the advance of technology and how it will improve our lives going forward.  

The Second Machine Age

In the book, I discovered the OrCam, a wonderful new technology that reads text for the user.  It’s essentially a little camera that attaches to your glasses and has a small speaker near your ear.  When the user points at text, it is read to her.  Right now the cost is $2,500.00, but as McAfee correctly points out, the cost should come down fairly rapidly.  Here` is a link to the OrCam site and be sure to watch the video demonstration below. 

Musings

Why does the Kindle let me change the size of the fonts in the book I’m reading, but not in the menu?