Subject:
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Re: New user Needs Help from Any one who will....
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Mon, 27 Mar 2000 23:17:28 GMT
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My father, legally blind from birth, functioned as a sighted person until
very late in life, when he became functionally blind. I helped him set up
a PC with a voice synthesis board so that he could hear what he was typing.
Fortunately, he could still touch type with reasonable accuracy. The key
to usability was having information in a pure text format that the voice
synthetizer could handle.
In our brave new world, computers can (with difficulty) understand our own
voice inputs as well as emit robotic voices back to us. This is clearly a
great leap forward. And yet, pure text is still the most flexible format to
bridge the sight/sound gap.
I certainly echo the statements of others in recommending NQC as the best
development environment. Pure text is exactly the right format for NQC. I am
sure that Dragon (or other) macros can be set up to deal with the syntactic
nuances of NQC.
There is a real opportunity waiting for someone to create a voice synthesized
building instructor from LDRAW files! These files are in fact, pure text, and
writing a voice synthesizer to read LDRAW ".dat" files and output spoken
step-by-step instructions should not be too much harder than writing code
to render those same files as images on the screen. (No, I'm not volunteering,
sorry.)
If a blind Mindstorms user had their parts bins organized by Lego part number
(which LDRAW uses, for the most part), then the program could speak the part
number, which would instantly lead to the appropriate parts bin. The program
could then speak the peg or hole numbers on the mating parts, and finally,
the orientation of the parts. A user-friendly program would allow the user
to run backwards and forwards through these assembly steps, so that ticklish
steps could be tried until they worked.
I wonder if we could get Ray Kurtzweil interested in Lego?
-Bill Leue
In lugnet.robotics, Dean Husby writes:
> deanns wrote:
>
> > I am a new user of the Ris 1.5 system. I was hoping this list might help
> > me- a totally Blind user of the kit with building instructions for the
> > basic robots. The materials in the kit demonstrate the building of the
> > robots with pictures. Since I use speech with my computer it does not
> > recognize the pictures.
>
> I too use Speech to program my designs. (Dragon).
>
> I also have difficulty with the picture based programming options.
>
> I can also wholeheartedly suggest using NQC. I see you have his book and • should
> know where to get the software from. NQC is also the unofficial standard for
> programming the RCX. (With the standard Firmware)
>
> IF you have any other questions of me, you can email me. Thanks.
>
> Dean
> --
> TFM's Home Page: http://www.akasa.bc.ca/tfm
> Dean's Lego Workshop: http://www.akasa.bc.ca/tfm/lego_wr.html
> Vancouver Lego Club: http://www.akasa.bc.ca/vlc
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: New user Needs Help from Any one who will....
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| (...) I too use Speech to program my designs. (Dragon). I also have difficulty with the picture based programming options. I can also wholeheartedly suggest using NQC. I see you have his book and should know where to get the software from. NQC is (...) (25 years ago, 27-Mar-00, to lugnet.robotics)
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