See this bowl of a lot of clarified butter. There is really nothing else to say about this image. Try the color filter. The butter seems to be primarily orange and yellow.
ghee
A bowl of clarified butter
Lemon water and soup
In the previous post, I had mentioned the inverted napkin. Now, see the glass of lemon water and the bowl of soup. I was using the mobile phone version of the vOICe and even without a headset, I was able to tell that the soup bowl was shallower than the glass and I suspect larger in diameter though I did not think about the diameter at that time. Also have a play with the color filters. The lemon water is yellow and the soup is green.
lemonWater
soupBowl
An inverted napkin
I was dining at the Delhi golf course. The napkin at my table was placed to my right in the shape of an inverted cone. It reminded me of a funnel. See this picture. Notice the napkin tapering to a point at the top of the image.
soundscape of napkin
Accessible wireshark at last
Wireshark is one of the best packet sniffers out there. Until now, there has been no easy way for a blind person to use it on windows since Wireshark uses GTK which is not accessible. Now, Nick Adamson has created a batch file that prompts for various wireshark parameters and can be used with it’s TShark utility which is the commandline version of Wireshark. The TShark commandline is complex with over 30 options and Nick’s batch file prompts the user through an easy series of steps to setup a scan etc.
Nick also has the following to say about the script.
“This script expects wireshark to be installed and the path in your path environment variable.
It takes no program arguments and provides on screen instructions.
I’ve tested most of it, if problems are found let me know.
Its been tested on Windows XP pro SP3 but should work on most flavours of windows as long as command extensions are enabled. On most versions of windows I’ve used command extensions are enabled by default.”
Before running the script, please change it’s extension to bat. I have had to keep the *.docx extention since that it is what WordPress permits.
runTshark
Viewing spectrograms using PRAAT and the vOICe
I was asked whether the vOICe could be used to sonify spectrograms in PRAAT. it can. See the steps below.
1. Launch PRAAT.
2. Reduce screen clutter if possible. Disable any unnecessary toolbars and close any unnecessary windows.
3. Load your sound file and using your screen reader’s mouse cursor, click on the “edit button”.
4. You now have a spectrogram displayed.
5. Launch the vOICe.
6. Navigate to the “options” menu.
7. Navigate to the “sonify gui” submenu and expand it.
8. Choose the option to sonify the area under the mouse pointer. This option sounds the view under the mouse pointer. The reason I have chosen this option is because the spectrum, according to the help appears as a grey line in the bottom half of the PRAAT window. You also may want to hit f5 for inverse video so that the grey spectrum stands out.
9. Hit windows+m to minimize all windows. By now, you should be hearing changes in sound as you navigate.
10. Navigate to the PRAAT window.
11. Assuming you are using a screen reader, switch to its mouse cursor.
12. Navigate towards the bottom of the screen. You will hear sound changes as you navigate through the various buttons. In my limited testing, the spectrom was a horizontal line that varied in pitch depending upon its frequency. The height of the line represents the frequency while the length of the line represents the length of the spectrum.
13. There seem to be a lot of options that dump the data about the current object to a text file so you may want to use them to get precise numbers etc.
14. You can slow down the soundscape to facilitate better interpretation.
15. Try loading different sound files with varing frequencies and look for the pitch changes in these files. This will help you in becoming oriented to the spectrom and how it sounds.
J-Tools text notes Rock
I was writing a report the other day. The report involved filling out columns in a large spreadsheet namely Exdcel 2007. By large I mean over 250 rows. A number of questions had similar answers so a large amount of text was being repeated with small changes. I made a text note of the base text and then kept pasting the text note into different cells. When I needed to edit text, I could activate edit mode and paste the contents of the text note into a cell and then make a series of quick changes and I was ready to move on to the next question.
I do not have empirical evidence of this but I suspect I halved the time I would have taken to write that report thanks to text notes!!
From the Keyboard to the Microphone: A More Natural Way of Computing
This is my article in <a href="http://www.blindskills.com/dialogue.html"Dialogue magazine It deals with migrating from using the keyboard to using speech-recognition.
The article also makes a special reference to screen readers and other bridging technology like J-Say
The article has been published in the November December Issue.