Greetings and felicitations:
[I agree, this sounds interesting.]
I received the following note from a company called Cobblestone
software. It asks the question: is bar coded information on paper
something that the blind would find useful? Frankly, I don't
really know. I would need time to think about it. But I thought
that the idea was novel enough for others on this list to see;
hence, I am forwarding the major portion of the note I received.
See below.
Regards,
Curtis Chong
chong99@concentric.net
===========================================================================
We at Cobblestone Software have developed a technology, which we call
PaperDisk, that encodes large amounts of digital information on paper. This
should be of great value in providing information access to blind or
visually impaired people. PaperDisk can print on ordinary paper a pattern
encoding a textual file of up to hundreds of pages. By scanning this pattern
in with an off-the-shelf scanner, the textual information can be recovered
perfectly, and then read aloud with a speech synthesizer, or output on a
braille display.
PaperDisk is a uniquely powerful implementation of a technology called 2D
barcode. A 2D barcode, just like an ordinary barcode, encodes digital
information on paper by means of a pattern. The difference is that a 2D
barcode can encode a great deal of information. Familiar barcodes represent
information in just one dimension, the horizontal. 2D barcodes, however,
utilize two dimensions, both the vertical and the horizontal -- vastly
increasing carrying capacity.
The idea of applying 2D barcode to the needs of the visually impaired has
already been pursued in some measure. At President Clinton's Inaugural, as
part of a program to provide accessible media for the visually impaired, a
2D barcode was printed on the back of the program, encoding the Inaugural
Address. Scanners decoded the barcode and the contents were output to a
speech synthesizer.
Another related development of potentially great importance to the
implementation of this idea is the Information Based Indicia Program (IBIP)
of the U.S. Postal Service. This program will enable printing 2D barcodes on
letters to serve as authentication of postage paid. These indicia may be
generated from a PC, and are likely to have great penetration in the
marketplace.
We at Cobblestone gave a talk about our technology at a recent Postal
Service conference. The Postal Service was seeking to determine further uses
of the indicia beyond prevention of fraud. Among the recommendations we made
was to utilize it to provide information access for blind or visually
impaired users. A description of the contents of the letter, or, in some
cases, the contents themselves might be placed within the indicia. The
information would be retrieved perfectly, unlike the output of OCR. (Of
course, the blindness community would best decide how to structure such
information.) The recommendation appeared to be well received at the time,
but the outcome is quite uncertain. If the blindness community has an
interest in implementing this concept, it would certainly do well to make
that interest known to the Postal Service early on in the process, before
the structure of the barcode is committed to other purposes.
Allow me to briefly summarize some of the capabilities of PaperDisk. At the
upper end, with a Linotronic printer and a 600 dpi HP 3c scanner, we have
been able to encode slightly more than 1MB of data on one side of a printed
page. We expect that this density could be achieved by standard offset
printing processes. With a desktop configuration of a high quality 600 dpi
laser printer and a good 300 dpi flatbed scanner, we can typically get up to
215KB-290KB per page. Since we automatically compress our data using ZIP
compression, this often amounts to a full megabyte of text. Less precise
scanners and printers achieve lower densities, but even at these lower
densities the technology is quite powerfully useful.
It is our intention to popularize the use of paper as a digital storage
medium. To this end, the shareware version of PaperDisk incorporates its
most powerful and important functions; no form of time out has been imposed.
The shareware download is available at our web site.
We are most eager to determine the viability of PaperDisk as a technology
for use by the visually impaired. We would certainly welcome any feedback
you might have on this matter. If you have any insight you wish to offer, or
can make further suggestions about how we might proceed, I would very much
appreciate hearing from you. I can be reached by e-mail at
toma@paperdisk.com, or by phone at (617)863-0035.
Thanks,
Tom Antognini
President, Cobblestone Software
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Dec 02 2012 - 01:30:04 PST