Eh, do we see one of the few cases, where we could wish for an
electronic feature of the next generation Optacon?
We have been talking of the benefit of the Optacon leaving all the
interpretation to the human brain. And yet, what if you got a new
Optacon. you sit down and do your reading, and come across a part of the
text in thick print. You now press a button on the Optacon, and a tiny
piece of software kicks in. It does no interpretation, no reshaping, no
nothing. What it is all about, is that it will scan the picture of the
character, and rip off all the thickness. What is left for you to feel,
is a true copy of the character, but with thinner lines.
The basics of the technology could be described as follows.
Scan the image;
Look for continuous lines in the image, where three or more needles next
to each others are active;
Cut off one of the needles in such cases.
Your shape-lines of the character, now will be one needle thinner. If
you press the button once again, the software will go one step further,
taking the shape-lines down to one needle - the thinnest and most crisp
you could get.
Of course, there are the moments, when you find yourself wishing there
would be a chance to thicken some text. That could specially be, when a
font type has very thin lines in the top and bottom of the characters.
In such cases, there could be a second button, leaving you the chance to
activate extra needles on the thinner parts of the image.
What do you think. This would be no interpretation, but more a bit of
assistance in "seeing" the shape more clearly, leaving you the better
chance to perform the recognition of the characters. Promise you, when
dealing with things like electronic diagrams, I've been wishing for some
kind of ways to make the lines thicker, just as frequently as I wish
there would be ways to make shapes thinner.
As a bit of a sidenote here, which goes along the same line of ideas,
how about when you read text that vary between bold (emphasized) text,
and plain characters. Or, where you would have a mix of fonts, some more
outstanding than others. Great if you are eager to know the outlook of
the page. And necessary whenever you are to deal with certain features
of the material you read, like recognizing and distinguish the very
number, in a mathematical formula. But it often leads to extensive
thumbling with the knobs of the Optacon, raising and lowering the
intensity and thickness of the displayed image. What if the next Gen
Optacon had a feature, that could be turned on, which would attempt to
give some mild equalization through out the text. It would attempt to
reduce the boldness of the boldest print, somehow making it close to the
rest of the text. A trained user would still feel a slight boldness to
the print, but it would be no more than what still would be readable,
without any further adjustment. Kind of a
"This is my reading level"-setting.
This level of adjustment could be saved, and brought up, whenever the
user wants to do a plain reading of text. You then can go for the raw
reading, like we have to day, if you need all the whistles and bells of
the text layout. But in most daily activities, when you do not care much
about the layout, only want to get to the info, the levelled-reading
could be activated.
And yes, of course any such settings should be divided into as small
steps as possible in practical terms. Having only one or two steps of
adjusting, may prove unacceptable. Again, blowing the Optacon with 129
steps for adjusting, will likely be little practically beneficial, and
rather prove frustrating. Something between 8 and 12 steps, either
direction, might be useful. You then could go from minus 12, to plus 12
- 0 being the standard, or Raw mode. Raw mode, would be what we already
have on our current Optacon models.
Technically, these features are possible, and not too difficult to
implement in the software - I would conclude. It is all about
algorithms, and is being done in photo handling in dedicated
applications on your computer and cellphone already. Without me having
checked it up, I am ready to think there might be some freeware
algorithms available on the net already, that could be used for such up
and down scaling of the thickness and boldness of scannings of the
printed text.
Lastly, one more thing that I find myself often wishing for, is the
chance of bi-derectional scaling of the image. You all are familiar with
the slider on top of the camera, leaving you the chance of adjusting the
magnification of the character a bit. But it seem to only change the
hight of the character. I wish there would be ways, to adjust the
magnification either direction. Sometimes it would have been nice to
widen the character a bit, other times it is nice to lower the hight.
And there would even be times when you need do a bit of adjustment to
both the hight and width of the character, to have the best reading
experience. Specially this comes true, when you deal with symbols, icons
and things like diagrams of different sorts. If the slider had been
replaced with a four way button, like the arrow-button on some old-style
cellphones and remote controls, you could have stepped up and down in
either hight or width. Press Up-arrow to raise the hight, Down-arrow to
lower it. Press Right-arrow to increase the width, and left-Arrow to
decrease. Even some users might find that they would read better, if the
character could be centered more to the point on their finger, where
they hold the highest sensitivity.
Don't know, what the rest of you think. Got a few more ideas here, but
we'll save them for later.
On 3/25/2020 6:34 PM, Carolyn wrote:
I agree about thick print, as opposed to thin and sharpthe quotes) in the message subject.
print.
-----Original Message-----
From: optacon-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:optacon-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
harlynn@xxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2020 3:18 AM
To: optacon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [optacon-l] Hi, Optaconers
This is Bob from Brooklyn, NY. I have been using my optacon
to go over
mail: I read part with the optacon, and part with my Sara.
I like how they work together. I find that my main problem
is still that I often think I know the next word in a
sentence, and then realize I guessed wrong, and have to go
back and figure it out.
Very thick print is challenging for me. But regular print,
I can do pretty well.
I hope all of you are safe, and perhaps using some down time
to use your optacons!
Kind regards,
Bob
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