Show HN: Voice - An iOS App that lets blind people read

57 点作者 shainvs将近 11 年前

14 条评论

As someone who used to exclusively write software for the visually impaired at Ai Squared (I wrote a huge portion of <a href="http://sitecues.com" rel="nofollow">http://sitecues.com</a> during my time there), I wanna thank Shalin for building this. There are VERY few developers (in fact, non-developers, too) out there who understand the needs of that audience. We all take that stuff for granted, but to a blind person, this type of software means so much to them. I remember going to the CSUN Conference last year and meeting a bunch of amazing folks who were blind and seeing them use our software ... I was in a happy mood for weeks after that experience. Please continue building software like this. Please. Much respect, Shalin. You're awesome, man.- Jonathan

computerjunkie将近 11 年前

I'm happy there are developers out there that understand there are blind people out there who have a hard time using things we take for granted. This is a great approach to solving real problems that affect people. Kudos Shalin.A personal opinion, these are the kind of ideas that should get backed by Venture Capitalists as compared to the "Yo" application.

ndarilek将近 11 年前

Cool app. Just a bit of feedback:1. Since you're targeting blind users, you may want to use a bit more ARIA on your page, particularly around the popup menu.2. It would be nice if the main page explicitly stated that this was for IOS. I'm an Android user and had to explicitly click through to figure out it wasn't for me. IOS certainly has a larger share of blind users, but Android is popular as well.Good luck! Any plans for an Android version? If so, and you'd like a tester who is also a developer familiar with its accessibility framework, please do let me know.

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qrazhan将近 11 年前

My initial impression of this app is that it's a cool demo of OCR technology, but I'm not sure how useful it would actually be to blind people. How would they know if they are taking a good enough picture of the text in the first place? How do they even hit the button? I could see using one of the hardware buttons as a shutter could work, but I don't know if you can do that in iOS.(Note: I'm neither blind nor an iOS user so I do not know how blind users use iOS. Please correct me if I am wrong.)

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MaxGabriel将近 11 年前

When I first opened the site there the main graphic loaded really slowly. Its a 2.1 MB PNG; you may want to change it to JPEG since it'll be way smaller and look just the same (especially since its a photo to begin with).<a href="http://www.shalinshah.me/voice/images/bg2.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.shalinshah.me/voice/images/bg2.png</a>Edit: I made a 60% JPEG from this PNG that weighs in at 281KB if you want to use it:<a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/okqij5hiubw08sz/bg2.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/s/okqij5hiubw08sz/bg2.jpg</a>Also somewhat weird that "Get this app" isn't centered like the rest of the content.<a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/80piftabnf57jwt/Screenshot%202014-08-05%2015.29.35.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/s/80piftabnf57jwt/Screenshot%202014-...</a>

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abigezunt将近 11 年前

Are there any blind users of your app? How does it compare to the existing technologies that blind people are using for reading? What do blind people think of it so far? How does it handle formatting, OCR errors, fast-forwarding, that kind of thing?

malloreon将近 11 年前

People looking for audio access to textbooks and other printed materials should check out<a href="https://www.learningally.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.learningally.org/</a>They're a non-profit that provides volunteer-read mp3s of text books and other popular reading materials. Last I checked, they received a government grant that let them give away memberships to blind/dyslexic students.I used to read for them - knowing thousands of people have used the thousands of pages I read to learn is really satisfying.

matthijs_将近 11 年前

Great product, English works great. I also tried it out on Dutch text, but that didn't work so well of course.But still, very nice! Probably also a very useful tool for people who have dyslexia.

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eglover将近 11 年前

Why choose this over audio-books and advanced TTS software? As qrazhan noted, it's very difficult (unnecessarily so) to use in the first place. (ie. electronics are already the way to go, why would you care about print versions vs. digital versions if you're blind? they all sound the same).I wonder, is this something you yourself use? Are you blind? In which case, I'm sure you're aware that this is not how assistive software works. Sorry, I just don't get it.

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chrmaury将近 11 年前

Very excited to see more people working on accessible applications!How is this different from TextDetective, or other OCR apps for the blind?

devindotcom将近 11 年前

Is this strictly for books? Because audiobooks are a fairly well established way for the blind to read those. Does this work in any way with periodicals, webpages, and newspapers? They often have unpredictable layouts. Letting a blind person read the front page of the New York Times print edition would be a pretty great accomplishment.

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DesaiAshu将近 11 年前

Awesome project Shalin, great to see you using your coding powers to tackle serious problems!

notduncansmith将近 11 年前

I wish I could try this out, but it crashes on load for me. Damn iOS 8 beta.

vipuljshah将近 11 年前

Nice app. Keep it up.