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August 6, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 4A; Page 16; Column 1; Education Life Supplement

LENGTH: 1603 words

HEADLINE: TECHNOLOGY;
Tools For Blind Students

BYLINE: By Judith Berck; Judith Berck is a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore.

BODY:
WHEN Priscilla McKinley returned to the University of Iowa in 1990 to complete her B.A. after losing her vision because of complications from diabetes, she was scared. Although she was raising her son and holding a job transcribing medical tapes, college seemed a daunting prospect -- all those books and assignments to read, those papers to write under deadlines, class notes to take, exams to complete and dozens of new people to meet.

"I was afraid to go back to school," recalled Ms. McKinley, 33, who lives a few miles from campus in Iowa City with her 11-year-old son, John, and takes buses to her classes.

Computer technology helped, but products for the blind were expensive and limited in what they could do. If an assigned book was not already recorded on tape, for example, Ms. McKinley had to find a person to tape it or read it to her. "It was a huge hassle," she said.

Now Ms. McKinley has completed her B.A. and is a graduate student in Iowa's nonfiction writing program, working on a memoir about learning to accept her blindness. And in the intervening five years, the computer revolution seems to have caught up to her.

"Technology gave me back a lot of what I thought I'd lost in the way of independence," she said.

Computer products for the blind have become more plentiful and less expensive in recent years. These days, a typical high-tech student package -- a personal computer, a page scanner, a talking screen (software and hardware) and a hand-held note taker that can download to a hard drive -- averages about $5,000. That's about half of what a remotely comparable (and inferior) system cost five years ago.

"Over the last couple of years it's been quite dramatic," said James Fruchterman, president of Arkenstone Inc., a nonprofit company in Sunnyvale, Calif., that develops and adapts computer products to the needs of disabled people. "It is more affordable and a lot better."
All this is good news for the nation's blind college students -- roughly 5,000 undergraduates and 1,000 graduate students, according to the National Federation of the Blind in Baltimore.

And while the special equipment and software they use can lag behind the latest programs -- those written for Windows, for instance -- blind students like those at Iowa are using technology to negotiate college with far greater ease.

Today, Ms. McKinley's voice-synthesizer hardware (about $1,200) gives her IBM-clone personal computer the capability of saying what's on the screen in nine different voices, including Perfect Paul and Whispering Wendy, with appropriate punctuation stresses. The synthesizer runs in conjunction with screen-reading software ($450) ) that allows her to use the arrow keys to search quickly for words, sentences or pages of text, which the system then reads aloud. The talking-screen gear is fully compatible with Ms. McKinley's DOS software and with Wordperfect, her word processing software.

To read classmates' essays and books not on tape, Ms. McKinley uses a flatbed scanner ($600) and character-recognition software ($995) that is connected to her computer. The system scans a page and sends the information to her computer in 30 seconds. "The scanners have gotten a lot faster, cheaper and better than they were a few years ago," she said.

Some of this equipment is available at Iowa's student disability office, which was set up and equipped in response to the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1977 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

"We had over 100 students come here to take exams -- some 600 hours' worth -- on our computers last semester," said Donna Chandler, coordinator of the university's Student Disability Services. Demand is so high, she said, that "we're running out of rooms and resources to do this."

Still, many blind students prefer to set up their own customized systems at home. Ms. McKinley bought much of her gear from Arkenstone, which sells its original and adapted products at a discount to blind people.

Had she needed financial help with the purchase, Ms. McKinley could have turned to the Iowa Department for the Blind, which considers aid requests on a case-by-case basis. Craig Slayton, the agency's director, says that even though prices have plummeted overall, today's blind students require more high-tech devices than their predecessors did. (His own technology as a student was limited, he says, to a $2.50 manual Braille Slate-and-Stylus, a hole-punch writing device still in use.)

One Iowa student who got help from the state agency is Behnaz Soulati, 26, who lost her sight in Iran seven years ago after she was injured by flying glass from a bomb explosion. She came to Iowa "because friends and relatives live here."

THROUGH the agency, which receives 80 percent of its $6 million annual budget from the Federal government, Ms. Soulati learned how to use a computer and received her first screen-reading program.

"In Iran, I didn't see anybody who was blind except for beggars," said Ms. Soulati. "I never thought I'd be able to do anything. Everything changed when I went to the Iowa Department for the Blind."

Ms. Soulati, who majored in computer science and French, got her B.A. from the university in 1993 with highest honors and has now earned an M.A. in French literature. To help defray equipment costs and support herself in graduate school, she has been teaching French to undergraduates.

To write and edit her French papers, Ms. Soulati has a special French-language voice synthesizer ($1,195) that can speak what's on her screen in French. (Such screen readers are now available in 20 languages, including Danish, Hawaiian and Welsh; prototypes are being developed for others, including Czech, Russian and Swahili.) For English, Soulati uses another voice synthesizer ($895).

To take notes in class, Ms. Soulati uses a tape recorder or a Braille and Speak, a handheld note taker that allows her to type in Braille and has its own speech synthesizer to read back her
computer science and French, got her B.A. from the university in 1993 with highest honors and has now earned an M.A. in French literature. To help defray equipment costs and support herself in graduate school, she has been teaching French to undergraduates.

To write and edit her French papers, Ms. Soulati has a special French-language voice synthesizer ($1,195) that can speak what's on her screen in French. (Such screen readers are now available in 20 languages, including Danish, Hawaiian and Welsh; prototypes are being developed for others, including Czech, Russian and Swahili.) For English, Soulati uses another voice synthesizer ($895).

To take notes in class, Ms. Soulati uses a tape recorder or a Braille and Speak, a handheld note taker that allows her to type in Braille and has its own speech synthesizer to read back her other equipment.

Like Ms. Soulati, the vast majority of blind computer users stick with DOS programs, which allow them to do everything with a keyboard and text commands rather than with a mouse that points at screen icons.

The problem is that most applications programs today are written for Windows, the Microsoft Corporation's graphical add-on to DOS, which involves the use of icons.

"There's a lot of new technology that our voice synthesizers can't read, especially if it's Windows-based, where you have to see the icon to click on it," said Stewart Edwards, 25, a recent Iowa graduate majoring in business who lost his sight five years ago as a result of illness.

Recently, several screen readers have been developed that can recognize the icons and menus used by Windows programs and read them aloud. (Blind users can then use keyboard commands, instead of a mouse, to navigate the software).

But the new screen readers still have problems in recognizing some graphical elements of Windows programs. And some Windows programs, like Netscape, used for browsing the World Wide Web, have no provisions for substituting mouse movements with keyboard commands.

Greg Lowney, a senior program manager at Microsoft in Redmond, Wa., said that "in the last six months or so, we've really stepped up the effort to improve accessibility for people with disabilities." The upcoming Windows 95, he said, will include "a whole bunch of features" for blind access, including a way for applications programs to read aloud the name of any icon on the screen.

Blind people do not have to wait for access to the Internet, however, since voice synthesizers can read aloud the text, including menus and electronic mail.

"The Internet is so cool," said Ms. McKinley. "Blind students at home can look things up in the library catalogues, register for classes, and get books and magazines directly."

Using the Internet

The Internet has a number of sites of interest to blind users.

Mailing Lists

Blind-L (focuses on issues facing blind people in employment, education and technology).

To subscribe, send e-mail to: listserv@uafsysb.uark.edu

On the subject line, type anything you want.

For the body of the message, type: Subscribe blind-L Yourfirstname Yourlastname.

EASI (focuses on issues of higher education).

To subscribe, send e-mail to: listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu

On the subject line write: anything.

For the body of the message, type: subscribe EASI Yourfirstname Your lastname.

World Wide Web

EASI: Equal Access to Software and Information (a grab-bag of information, plus links to other Internet sites that sponsor discussion about the disabled.

http://www.rit.edu/easi/

Newsgroups (Bulletin boards)

alt.education.disabled

GRAPHIC: Photos: Priscilla McKinley at home with her son, John. Her computer has a talking screen. Scanning a page for computer input. Behnaz Soulati teaches her French class, using notes from by a Braille-embossed printer. (Photographs by David Conklin for The New York Times)

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

LOAD-DATE: August 6, 1995