Text information serves as an understandable and comprehensive indicator, which plays a significant role in navigation and recognition in our daily lives. It is very difficult to access this valuable information for blind or visually impaired persons, in particular, in unfamiliar environments. With the development of computer vision technology and smart mobile applications, many assistive syste...

Opportunities for education and employment depend upon effective and independent travel. For mainstream society, this is accomplished to a large extent by printed signs. People who are print disabled, visually impaired, or totally blind are at a disadvantage because they do not have access to signage. Remote infrared signage, such as the Talking Signs (TS) system, provides a solution to this ne...

by Donald E. Rigby* Blind and disabled Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients may work and continue to receive benefits under certain provisions of the program. For those persons the basic earned income exclusions of the program apply, l which recognize the costs associated with employment and assures that they will have a higher gross income when they work than if they do not. The law a...

This paper presents a technical overview of the different subsystems of the Kurzweil Reading Machine--the nature of the information processed by each subsystem and the type of transformations performed. A description of how the user directs the machine is provided. The Veterans Administration's testing program, as well as those of the Bureau of Education for the Handicapped, the Rehabilitation ...

The Library of Congress National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped leads a co-operative network of specialized libraries and ancillary agencies that are delivering a successful programme of reading and informational services to blind, visually impaired and handicapped users. Its unique position within the Library of Congress and the benefits which emanate from this relati...

Structural health monitoring is described in the context of a statistical process control paradigm. This paper demonstrates the application of various statistical process control techniques such as the Shewhart, the exponentially weighted moving average, and the cumulative sum control charts to vibration-based damage diagnosis. The control limits are first constructed based on the measurements ...

In this paper, we focus our attention on blind demodulation for DS-CDMA transmission in the context of radio surveillance and military applications. We present a blind demodulation technique for DS-CDMA transmission over frequency selective channels. The technique exploits the autocorrelation properties of the transmitted signal to estimate the parameters (symbol duration, timing offset, phase ...

BACKGROUND Although lacking visual experience with numerosities, recent evidence shows that the blind perform similarly to sighted persons on numerical comparison or parity judgement tasks. In particular, on tasks presented in the auditory modality, the blind surprisingly show the same effect that appears in sighted persons, demonstrating that numbers are represented through a spatial code, i.e...

In this paper, we present TeleShop, the teleassistance module of ShopMobile 2, our mobile accessible shopping system for visually impaired (VI) and blind individuals that we have been developing for the past several years. TeleShop enables its users to obtain help from remote sighted guides by transmitting images and voice from their smartphones to the guides’ computers or phones. We have succe...

• Understanding why it might be useful to model the travel process. • Learning about some of the existing empirical research on mobility, wayfinding and spatial understanding. • Learning about the existing models of the travel process and developing an understanding of their advantages and limitations. • Understanding some of the factors that should be considered in models of the travel process...