I’m now convinced that I’m blogging to myself here, but what the hell.  My printer arrived today.  I’ll start building it next week.

As I reported in my previous entry, I recently bought a Macbook Pro.  For the past week or so I’ve been learning the essentials of using that system and thus far it has been a pleasant experience.  Most applications that are preinstalled such as iTunes, Safari and the email client are very accessible right out of the box.  In addition I’ve downloaded Skype as well as some other miscellaneous apps that work really well.  Not only is the UI very usable from an accessibility standpoint, but the Mac also provides a very accessible approach for using the power of unix commands in the terminal window.  In that sense it really gives the best of all worlds.  I’ll just go into a quick explanation of some of the accessibility features on the mac.

Apple has implemented a screen reader called VoiceOver, which is built into OSX 10.4 and higher.  The fact that it is built-into the OS has some interesting implications.  First, there is no screen reader installation process; you can simply walk up to any mac and press a hot-key and immediately have speech access to the OS.  Second, the installation of OSX is completely accessible and there is speech feedback during the entire install if needed.  This is something that is long overdue in Windows.  Currently there is no way to completely install Windows from start to finish with speech.  Some people have found ways around this such as using automated install procedures, but this does not account for the exceptional situations when an error may occur during the install.  Unlike windows where there are multiple 3rd party screen readers to choose from, on the mac VoiceOver, the built-in  screen reader is the only one currently available.

To tie this into more project-relevant subjects, by the end of the week I was able to test a python script on the mac which worked very nicely.  One thing I am interested in is writing scripts for VoiceOver, as I have a few ideas for some useful VoiceOver scriptlets.  According to the getting started with VoiceOver documentation, not only is VoiceOver scriptable with apple script but also pearl, ruby and python.  I thought this would be a good way to implement some of my ideas as well as practice some python skills.  The scripting documentation for VoiceOver however, does not seem very extensive, or maybe I just haven’t been looking in the right places.  If anyone stumbles across some good scripting documentation for VO or the mac I’d definitely be interested.

This week Stephanie and I continued to play around with image manipulation. We were pretty excited when we discovered the concept behind changing the background of an image. This meant that we could put George anywhere we wanted! Even on Zon (the Sun)!

The white background of George was replaced by another image.

This background swapping is done by comparing and image to another image that is the background of the original. If a pixel’s color differs by a certain designated amount, then that pixel is assumed to be part of the background and then changed to the corresponding picture of another image, the new background.

The next idea that was played around with was scaling. For simplicity, assume we are shrinking the image to half its original width and height. Then a new, empty image is created whose measeurements are half the size of the original. Then every other pixel on the original image is placed in successive positions in the new, smaller, image.

Following this method, we created Little George:

Which you can see is much smaller than original George:

Next we played around with placing images on top of one another. We were able to get Little George on George:

My name is Cory, and I am a totally blind Computer Science major at The College of New Jersey.  I will hopefully be able to provide some valuable feedback as this project progresses.

Speaking of which, let me give a quick update.  I was hoping to find a textbook in digital format that covers the subject of Python in grueling detail, and would be adequate for the project at hand.  Unfortunately, it seems that recorded textbooks on this subject are a bit hard to come by.  Doing a search through the RFB & D book catalog of recorded books yielded one search result having nothing to do with the Python I was interested in.  Luckily, there seems to be a plethora of free resources and tutorials online for learning Python.  I am currently looking through the Python tutorial that is part of the python documentation.  This tutorial assumes prior programming knowledge.  While I’m sure I’ll quickly outgrow this particular tutorial it’s a good starting place to get the syntax down.  I’m also pretty sure it does not cover multi-media topics such as image manipulation and the like.  After looking through this documentation, I just recently wrote my first, all be it very simple python program.  The fact that there is no compilation required seems to greatly speed up the process of testing.  My first program was very simple, displaying text to the screen and containing one conditional statement.

I should also point out that, while I did install active python on my Windows-based computer, I was excited to learn that the Mac comes with Python built in.  Since I just recently purchased a macbook pro I plan to try it out on that platform as well, just as soon as I get a bit more comfortable with the mac in general.  I may have some things to say about screen reading on the mac, and general mac accessibility once I delve into it a bit more.