Devices For The Disabled

Introduction

The technology and the computers are very important for everyone, but they are more important for the disabled. No matter if a person is blind, deaf or motor impaired, now they can do their life activities like another person without disabilities by assistive technology.

This material contend many of the devices for the disabled, like braille and embossers keyboards, screenmagnifiers, Optical Character Recognition, Electronic notetaking, Textphones, ergonomic keyboards, electricpower wheelchairs, and another devices that not only help disabled people to do their activities, besides this technology give them rehabilitation.



Devices for the disabled
1.1 Computers for the disabled and Assistive Technology
Individuals with disabilities are any persons whohave a physical or mental impairment which substantially limits one or more major life activities, such as walking, seeing, hearing, speaking, breathing, learning and working.
In our society computers have taken a dominant role, meaning most jobs now require access to computers and the internet. But what happens if a person is blind, deaf or motor-disabled? The answer is AT.
Assistivetechnology (AT) enables disabled individuals to have greater control over their lives, participate in and contribute more fully to activities in home, school, work and community or benefit from opportunities that are taken for granted by individuals who do not have disabilities.

Assistive technologyis designed to help them use computers and do theirs jobs in the office, learn at school, or interactwith their families at home. It is a term that includes assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative devices. AT promotes greater independence by enabling people to perform tasks that they were formerly unable to accomplish, or had great difficulty accomplishing, by providing enhancements to or changed methods of interacting with the technology needed to accomplish such tasks.
1.2 Devices forblind person
To work effectively, most blind users need to have their computers adapted with technologies such as Braille, screen magnifiers, speech synthesis and Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
The Braille system is a method that is widely used by blind people to read and write, and was the first digital form of writing. It was devised in 1821 by Louis Braille, a blind Frenchman.
Braillekeyboards have Braille lettering on keyboard overlays, allowing the blind user to easily identify each key.
Braille embossers are printers that produce tactile Braille symbols on both sides of page at high speed. These devices print a hard copy of a text document in Braille. Braille embossers usually need special Braille paper which is thicker and more expensive than normal paper. Some high-endembossers are capable of printing on normal paper.

A screen magnifier is software that interfaces with a computer's graphical output to present enlarged screen content. It is a type of assistive technology suitable for visually impaired people with some functional vision. This type of software can enlarge text and images appearing on the screen by up to 16 times. The greater the magnificationthe smaller the proportion of the original screen content that can be viewed, so users will tend to use the lowest magnification they can manage.

A speech synthesisis the artificial production of human speech. It is used to read aloud the work on the computer. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, which produces the audio output and can be implemented in softwareor hardware. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech. Other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech.
A screen reader is a software application that attempts to identify and interpret what is being displayed on the screen. It sent to standard output, whether a video monitor is present or not. This program reads...