I don't think there is a versus, when you're talking about optacons and
scanners, they can both work tandemly to give you the best experience.
Same with OCR apps. Some do one thing better than others, and if you have a
multiple of them, you are going to have the most well-rounded experience.
Judy
"Embrace each day with His mercies and blessings."
-----Original Message-----
From: optacon-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:optacon-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of dan.tevelde@xxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2019 3:18 PM
To: optacon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [optacon-l] Optacon Versus Scanners
I think scanners have the same relationship with the optacon as audio books
do with Braille. Audio books are nice if you want to listen to text quickly
but for getting all of the details and remembering them, there's no
substitute for Braille. I use various scanning applications on my iPhone
and they have their place. I don't use or like Android apps at all but
that's another story.
One use of the optacon I found unique in high school was reading books and
dictionaries in Spanish. I was able to ask people about special characters
and they would understand what I was referring to. This is not the case
now. I remember when the National Library Service adopted UEB as a Braille
standard. The first time I saw German and Spanish special characters in UEB
Braille I didn't know what they were. I had to guess. There was nobody
around who knew UEB Braille to tell me what the character was. That would
not have been the case if I had been using an optacon. I could have taken
the book or magazine to someone and asked them.
This is why I think the development of a new optacon is still important.
With all of the projects to make multi-line Braille and graphics displays
you would think someone could design a small tactile array the size of the
one used in the original optacon. We have the tools and the technology.
It's just a matter of someone doing the work. I think the hardest part
would be designing the feature set, and doing the software development. We
could refine haptic technology which is already used on mobile devices to
represent charts and graphs. This technology could be refined and built
into any device we could develop. It just takes some imagination and lots
of money. I'm disappointed that no organization of the blind expresses much
interest in supporting a new optacon. I don't have the expertise to take on
such a project.
Dan
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