Taiwan has one of the highest Internet usage rates in the world with 13.8 million
users. Roughly 58 percent of the population of 22.8 million is able to
access the Internet from home. But for the visually impaired the statistics are very different. Of the nation's 50,000 blind residents less than 5 percent have regular access to
computers.
While it might seem that the nation's blind population has a raw deal when it comes to Internet access, technological breakthroughs over the past five years have in fact enabled more blind people in Taiwan to interact in cyberspace than ever before.
In 2000 an estimated 600 people had access to screen-readers, or machines that enable the blind to enter and read text via a Braille finger pad. Since then this figure has doubled and now between 1,200 and 1,500 visually impaired citizens have access to computers and the Internet thanks to Tamkang University's Resource Center for the Visually Impaired (RCVI, 盲生資源中心).
"The numbers may be still be small, but without the work of the center they'd be even smaller," said Yang Sheng-hong (楊聖弘), secretary general of the Technology Development Association for the Disabled in Taiwan (TDADT,
"Before the center began its work Taiwan's blind had little or no opportunity to access information or use computers on an everyday basis."
Established in 1989, the RCVI is the nation's leading research center geared toward the development of new computer technology to suit the needs of the blind. Jointly funded by Tamkang University, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of the Interior, and with technical support provided by China Telecom, the center is considered by many as a vanguard movement for the improvement of the lot of the nation's blind.
The center first developed basic DOS-based equipment in the mid-1990s, but it wasn't until 2002 that equipment first began to make a real difference to lives of the blind following the release of the nation's first affordable Microsoft Windows-based Braille screen-reader.
The brown metal box, which measures 35cm by 20cm, has 45 touch Braille pads and employs a synthesized voice, which can be set to converse in either Mandarin or English. It reads items on the screen, describes graphics and states the user's keyboard commands. Costing around NT$50,000, the nation's first indigenous
Windows based screen-reader was dubbed "Super Braille."
Before its release the only suitable Windows compatible systems had to be imported form the US or Europe and cost around NT$100,000.
"It took longer to develop than initially thought, but since its release three years ago the Super Braille Windows system has become a fixture in both homes and work places," said the center's Lai Chun-chi (賴俊吉). "We managed to slash the costs of screen-readers and at the same time enable blind people to use Windows 98, 2000, and more recently XP. This is something that as recently as five years ago we never thought possible."
Although Lai modestly downplays the difficulties experienced by the center during the development of Super Braille, the work of the screen-reader is in fact quite complex. The Super Braille system is tasked with reading both links scattered on a page as well as any and all information arranged in tables. It has to differentiate between Web pages arranged in columns and those laid out in the more standard form of left to right.
RSS