SMS Texting For Visually Impaired People
A remark made by a visually impaired pupil on a school trip from the West country has led to a pioneering development enabling sight-impaired or blind people to use text messaging.
Mesar Hameed, 17, from the West of England School and College in Exeter, the specialist centre for blind and partially sighted young people in the south west of England, was visiting a technology project run by BT in London last year, when he commented to one of the managers how being unable to receive text messages left him feeling socially excluded from his peer group.
His comments were noted by BT Group manager Adam Oliver, who decided to investigate, with the help of the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), into a technological solution. Less than a year later, BTexact Technologies, BT’s advanced research and technology business, has developed a device that allows people to send text messages to a hand-held computer, which then ‘speaks’ the message so that someone who cannot see the screen can hear the message instead.
Now Adam Oliver has gone back to Mesar and his fellow pupils at the school to give them a demonstration of how the technology works.
“It’s a great idea,” says Mesar, who was one of two pupils selected by the school for visually impaired and blind youngsters to visit BT’s Access to Information Centre, after a member of staff at the school won a competition last year.
“You do feel left out not being able to send messages, and at the moment you have to get someone else to read it out to you, which you might not want if it’s personal.” Fellow sixth-form pupil Andrew Moyes, 17, added: “It’s annoying if there’s no-one around to read a message for you as well. This way we can do it ourselves.”
Project instigator Adam Oliver, 35, who met Mesar, and fellow sixth-form pupil Simon De La Mare, 17, when they visited the Access to Information project at BT last year, says the development came about entirely through their comments.
“What Mesar said really got me thinking,” he said. “Text messaging is pretty important to teenagers these days, and I thought there must be something we can do to help. I went to the RNIB and they said as far as they knew there wasn’t anything on the market, so we put some funding into developing a new method using BTexact.
“What it’s come up with is an incredible achievement. The handset takes technology from a Windows-based PC, and makes it work on a pocket-sized computer. This could be the development that enables visually impaired people to take part in the social revolution of SMS texting.”
Steve Tyler, senior strategic manager for digital technology at the RNIB said, “the RNIB has worked with BT before on other technology projects in areas such as voice synthesis, and this latest development is very exciting.
“Text messaging has become a necessary feature of most people’s social, as well as business life, so the RNIB is delighted that a reliable and practical method for reading text messages has been developed for people who are visually impaired.”
BT is now looking for commercial partners in order to develop this technology into a viable retail product.
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