Deaf, blind student builds new worlds

It's also inspired her to work on an engineering first: a laptop-based system that will "speak" as she types in Braille and also translate speech back into Braille, making communication even easier.

Caudill, 24 and an undergraduate at the University of Delaware, was once limited to communicating only with people who knew Braille or through expensive and sometimes hard-to-find interpreters who acted as go-betweens. Now she uses software that converts computer text into Braille, thus allowing her to surf the Web, read e-mail and meet new people online all the time.

But the Net is just a slice of Caudill's life and, if a research project she and others are developing comes to fruition, Caudill and thousands of other blind and deaf people could be using a laptop to strike up communication anywhere, anytime in the physical world - in an office, a classroom, at home, or in a store.

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Translation bugs
Prof. Richard Foulds, a University of Delaware computer scientist, encouraged Caudill and fellow student Beth Finn to conceptualize a device in his student-design course. The two came up with a laptop-based system that can convert speech into Braille and Braille back into speech.

Right now, the project uses a desktop computer but the idea is to scale down to a laptop. And glitches that need to be ironed out include translation errors. Moreover, the project will ask questions like: How many mistakes are acceptable before communication breaks down? What happens when Caudill wants to talk to someone who has never used the system?

Finn said her work as a programmer had shown her that integrating various components can be the most difficult part of a project. How best a person should alert the user of the system that they want to initiate a talk, for example, remains an unanswered question.

Federal backing
The project has already won a student design-competition award from the Rehabilitation Engineering Society and received a $98,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to build and evaluate a working prototype.

"We know how we want it to work and we know the components," Caudill explained. "We've basically been in the theory stage and we have to put into the practice stage."

Gary Strong, who heads the NSF's Human Computer Interaction Program, said the two-year grant was not so much to pay for building an actual system as for learning more about how computers can be designed to communicate with people.

"Computers have such potential to open doors to better communication for people with disabilities and for all people," Strong said. "By understanding how computers can mediate communication, we can not only help Krista and the deaf/blind community, but potentially everyone."

The speech-to-Braille project is based at Applied Science and Engineering Laboratories, a joint project of the University of Delaware and the duPont Hospital for Children.

The system uses a speech synthesizer developed at the lab, as well as off-the-shelf components like: JAWS, a Windows program for Braille; a Braille keyboard and output device; DragonDictate, a commercial voice-control program; a microphone unit that plugs into the computer's sound card; and Microsoft Visual C++, a programming language used to integrate the project components.

Improving the Net
Caudill, who's majoring in computer science with a minor in cognitive science, noted that the Internet itself could also use some fine-tuning to be more accessible to those like herself. "It provides a means of independence," she said. "And things are going pretty well but a lot of improvements could be made."

To surf the Web, Caudill uses an all-text Web browser called Lynx. But the software cannot read some of the most graphics-heavy sites or use the latest encryption technology needed for online commerce.

Efforts are underway to improve the design of Web pages to make them more accessible. Tim Berners-Lee, considered the father of the Web, has called universal accessibility "an essential aspect" of his creation. Berners-Lee now heads the World Wide Web Consortium, which develops and disseminates new Web standards.

The consortium currently has an "Accessibility Initiative" to improve Web access through smarter design and use of alternative navigation tools on Web pages.

Reuters contributed to this story.