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A blog dealing with sensory substitution and other esoteric concepts and technologies like speech-recognition and chaos theory

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Archives for February 2019

Coffee shops, dirty tables and Oreo shakes

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It was the weekend and I was on a family outing. We drifted into a coffee shop and found a table without difficulty. My mother remarked that the table was dirty. I tilted my head by 30 degrees and sure enough I could detect some dark objects on the table. I do not know what they were and did not care to find out. Once the waiter had cleaned the table, I took another look. I got a nice clean sound with no obstructions. I am going to develop the habit of scanning every restaurant table.
It took some thinking to figure out what I was going to drink. I do not like coffee so settled for an Oreo shake. The shake came in a jar like container which was short but had a large diameter. I tilted my head down and saw this cylindrical structure. It was astonishingly dark. It appears that Oreo shakes are brown and do not allow light to pass through them. As I drank the shake, I kept glancing at the container and was able to detect an increase in light. Visual confirmation that I was getting through the shake.

getting the orca screen reader working with a raspberry pi

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Many of us want to run the graphical orca screen reader on a raspberry pi, the credit card sized computer for the ultimate in portable computing experiences. This has been done before. I got this working last night and by popular demand, here are my instructions. Be warned, I went down a few rabbit and may be installing a few extra packages but at the end, orca is working.
My thanks to Michaele A. Ray of the website raspberry VI website for doing this first and showing that this is indeed possible and to the members of the raspberry-vi mailing list for help and urging me to write this post.

Prerequisits

You will need to have the following items.

  • A usb keyboard plugged into the pi for use on the pi console.
  • A pair of headphones or speakers connected to the headphone jack.
  • The raspberry pi should be powered and connected to the internet. A wired connection is the best as it is stable and easy to troubleshoot.

  1. Download the full raspbian image

    Download the latest image of raspbian from the below link. Get the full image as opposed to raspbian light. This is because the image has a lot of the graphical user interface things installed.
    download raspbian

  2. Getting the image on to the sd card

    Burn it on to a sd card using your program of choice. If you are using Microsoft windows, one of the most accessible programs is balenaEtchar

  3. Enable ssh at boot

    Once the image has been written, you will see 2 logical partitions on the sd card. There is a partition called “boot”. Create a blank file named “ssh” without the quotes on that partition. The way I do this on Microsoft windows is to go to a comma dprompt, switch to the drive that has the partition and then issue the following command.
    copy con ssh
    You will be in a line editor. Hit ctrl+z to save and close out of the file.

  4. Eject the card and load it into your pi.

  5. Boot the raspberry pi and login to it over ssh.

  6. Update the raspberry pi
    This step is crucial. Failure to do this will result in orca not speaking. Run the following commands.
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get upgrade -y
    sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
    Once the above commands have completed successfully, reboot the raspberry pi.

  7. Configure the pi to login to a text console

    run the following command.
    sudo raspi-config
    Read the screen output very carefully. You need to go into the boot options and enable the option to login to the console without a password.

  8. Once you have enabled the login, and are back on the main raspi-config screen, hit shift+tab once to save your settings and exit. Reboot.

  9. IInstall dependencies

    This is the trickiest part of the entire exercise.
    Orca needs a bunch of things to run. As of this writing, speech dispatcher and espeak are not installed by default.
    sudo apt-get install sox -y
    Install the sox package for multimedia libraries. Some of them may be needed by speech dispatcher.
    sudo apt-get install speech-dispatcher -y
    Install the speech dispatcher service. Orca needs to talk to speech synthesizer. Be warned, this is an older version of speech dispatcher. There is a new one available on github but I have not tried compiling it from source on this installation.
    sudo apt-get install espeak -y
    The espeak speech synthesizer
    sudo apt-get install gnome-orca -y
    The orca screen reader and associated dependencies

Once you have carried out the above steps, reboot the raspberry pi. The text console login comes in handy here. Ensure that you have a USB keyboard plugged in. You may want to ssh into the pi to ensure that the pi has booted. If you have configured the raspberry pi to automatically login into a text console, you can enter the following at the command prompt. Be warned, at this point, you do not have any speech therefore you should know your keyboard well.
startx
You will have to wait for at least 2 minutes for the gui to load. I am giving a safety margin. Once again, you do not have speech at this point. Press alt+f2. This will place you at a prompt where you can enter a command to execute.
Type the following
orca
You will need to wait yet again but you should hear orca talking.

There is much left to do. I am still working on how to start orca automatically once the gui loads and need to find a good way for this to coexist with a console screen reader such as fenrir. I will update this post as I get feedback and learn more.

Open kitchens and the wonder of food in progress

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I was at MKT. The restaurant is setup differently to most such establishments. It is in the lower ground floor of the Chanakya mall and boasts a variety of cuisines. You can read about them at the above link. Visually, it is a fascinating place thanks to the live kitchens. I have spent many hours looking at food and one of the biggest problems with food is the lack of contrast. It is usually difficult to get good light and food with a high contrast as compared to your plate such that you can see the food and eat. As usual, I was wearing the vision 800 glasses running the vOICe Sacheta and I wanted to see their 4 open kitchens. Once again, I was in a situation where touching was not appropriate because the chefs were stacking food outside, ready for the waiters to pickup. I wanted to see the activity. The kitchens were behind transparent glass but they did have large windows to allow the cooks to send the food out. I was able to see the clean rising flame of the Italian kitchen and the round pizzas that emerged from it. The nachos were lined up in baskets outside the live Mexican counter. They were cylindrical but there were some differences in their shapes in stacking.
We then had a look at the Indian section where the cook was making chapatis. I could see these as dark disks lying on the counter. This was one of those situations where I used my other senses to zero on to the object of visual interest. I localized the sound of the stacking and then pointed my head in that direction. Visual scanning would have given me the same information but I treat vision as a multi sensory process.
We then moved to the Chinese counter where there was some kind of machine and a lot of activity taking place.
I did once again try to watch the cooks at work but was unable to perceive the actual motion of the people. I did notice the rapid changes in the scenery so could tell something was happening.
Sacheta took a few videos after seeking permission from the staff. That gave me the chance to stand still and look. Panning my head from side-to-side also helped and when looking through a window, pan up and down for maximum visual coverage. You can see details without panning but the devil is in the details and a little interaction brings a lot of clarity.
My special thanks to Mr. Pankaj Mishra, one of the manager’s of MKT for being so welcoming. The service is good and, before I forget, the food was excellent.
Pro food tip: do try the house special when it comes to drinks.
Pro vision tip: when your table has a lot of items on it, scan your vicinity for that tall glass of mocktail so that you can grab it in one shot. Blindness techniques work too but scanning is so much cooler.