
Dear Alex:

      I'm sending to you a bit of the DOSVOX's story, telling some of
its uses, and talking about the perspectives face to the information
globalization using the Internet.  I think this text is interesting to
you, and will allow you to extract interesting material for your text.
The english is not good, but I think that the idea is.

      I'm also sending a copy of this to Ricardo Azoury.

Yours,

Jose' Antonio Borges
antonio2@nce.ufrj.br

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1. How DOSVOX began

     In August, 1993, I entered the Computer Graphics class of the
Informatics course at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Suddenly I noticed a student in the first seat, with strange eyes.  I
realized immediatelly that the boy could have some vision problem.

     I walked to him and we had the following conversation:

- "Hi, what is your name ?"
- "Hi, I'm Marcelo Pimentel."
- "Pardon, are you blind or have some serious problem with your
   vision ?"
- "I'm blind".

      I became a bit confused.  How to teach computer graphics, a
subject that is almost totally visual to a blind person ?  Computer
Graphics is also a mandatory discipline in the Informatics course.  A
complicated situation.  I decided to think with more time.

- "Marcelo, you know that this discipline deals with visual subjects.
Let's talk about this after the class, OK ?"

      I taught in the class, normally, but thinking in how to solve
the blind student problem.  Obviously, I could ask the Department to
liberate the student of the course, but I felt that it would be
important for his academical formation to study some important
mathematical subjects that are taught.  There should exist some way,
like substituting the visual part by something more useful for the
student.

      At the end of the class, I hadn't any conclusion.  I decided to
know more about the student and his problems.

- "Do you know programming ? "
- "Of course, teacher, if not, how could I be here ? "
- "And how do you create programs ?"
- "Well, when I entered the University, my father gave me a
   microcomputer, an IBM-PC XT.  I know where the keys are, and I type
   in, when I complete I call my father, he reads the screen to me,
   and this is how I program".
- "Is there in your computer any equipment that could help you in
   reading the screen or in your interaction, making easier your use ?"
- "No, teacher.  These things are very expensive.  My family
   couldn't pay for this."
- "Well, Marcelo, I will thing more in your case, and I'll tell you
   later what to do with relation to the course."
- "Ok, teacher".

     I went home, thinking how to solve this case.  I knew that, since
the 70's, many computer interfaces for blind people use have been
developed.  Even in Brazil, there were dozens of blind people que were
working as programmers or system analists, aided by those equipments.
Those interfaces, however were very expensives (the cost of a very
simple system is above US$3000,00), and so not adequate for broad use.
Even the University didn't have a system like this !

      I decided then to adapt the course for the blind student,
mantaining all the mathematical subjects, and substituting the visual
part for an oriented work that could lead to the creation of
facilities for other blind students.  My idea has been aproved by the
academic comission of the University.

 2 - How to build a system so every blind could use

     The key of our work would be the construction of a system that
could be used for students with medium-low-class families, using
inexpensive equipments that they could buy.

     It seemed more or less obvious that the building of a system
based on voice syntesys would be the correct choice, because it would
not involve complicated and expensive mechanical aspects.  And with an
digital-to-analog converter, built with resistors and a small
amplifier, there should be possible to create a hardware-software
interface for a PC to produce portuguese speech.  The hardware cost
(not including the microcomputer, obviously) would be less than 10
dollars.

Note:  Now sound boards are common and cheap, but in that time, they
where very difficult to find in Brazil !

     If our intention was that the system should be used by everybody,
it should speak portuguese.  This seems to be a fool thing, but
imagine a system build for americans that speak only french !  The
think is worst in Brazil, where less than 0.1 % of the blind people
speak another language !  (*)

(*) Note:  this explains the unsuccess of very good foreign computer
systems for the blind when applied in Brazil.

     I discovered then that there were many researches for english
speech synthesys, but very little for other languages, nothing for
portuguese.  Then I had to begin from the begining, recording every
sound of portuguese, and building a portuguese speech compiler, a very
hard task, specially because portuguese has a very different phonetics
compared to english.  The result was the first complete set of
portuguese speech syntesys that was built.

     More than to speak portuguese, the system should have a very
friendly interface, so the learning time should the minimum possible.
So, Marcelo, oriented and helped by me, have been building in his
course the first pieces of what is our DOSVOX system.

     At the end of the course, Marcelo was aproved with 9.5, what can
be considered a very high grade, for the computer graphics course
standard.  Marcelo has now total independence to use the computer,
using not only DOSVOX but many other tools that are now available in
the university.  He works with me and another blind student in the
development of new facilities in the scope of the DOSVOX project.

Note:
     DOSVOX is the result of the effort of many other people, each one
giving the better os their effort to the developments for blind
people.  Among them, it's important to highlight Diogo Fujio Takano,
designer of the low cost synthesyzer, Orlando Jose' Rodrigues Alves (in
memoriam) developer of many DOSVOX complexities, and Luiz Candido
Castro, blind, the master teacher of DOSVOX.

 3 - Why is DOSVOX so successful in Brazil ?

     DOSVOX has been spread in Brasil, and today has more than 1000
users.  One thousand of blind people that had their lives improved
with the computer.  DOSVOX produced a big impact in the integration of
the blind in the society, opening new perspectives of study and work.
Because the system is so inexpensive, any firm can think to buy a
system like this, so that it can have a blind person employed for
tasks like telemarketing, for example.  Students can read, write, and
be understood by teachers and coleagues that don't know Braille.

     Many other reasons produced the success of DOSVOX:

a) very low cost:
     The system has been industrialized and is now sold by less than
100 (one hundred) dollars, including cassete tapes showing how to use,
installation diskettes, the synthesizer and headphones.  Summing to
this value the price of an used IBM PB-286 (that is considered garbage
in Brasil), this means that the investment of a family to give a
computer for his blind son is less than 400 dollars !

     Somebody could say that in a country where the minimum salary is
100 dollars this is much !  We aggree, but we are working to
estimulate firms that are throwing away their old computers to give
them to blind poor students.

b) Third world technology:
     The technolygy that is used is very simple.  The source code, in
Turbo Pascal is distributed with the system to provide a source of
study for students that want to create technology for the disabled.
In fact, using the DOSVOX technology, some successful developments
have been done in the aid of rehabilitation of children with diseases
that impair speech.

c) the system speaks portuguese
     The system is made for the common brazilian blind person.  The
dialog is made in portuguese, removing "computeesh" and english words.

d) the system uses international standards
     DOSVOX produces and reads data that can be processed by other
programs of common use by non-blind people.

 4 - DOSVOX and Internet

      Telecomunications are a reality of these days.  Information
transportation via the telephone, linked to the international
communications network (Internet and others) that uses satelite
technology, allow the use of informations in instant and transparent
ways directly by our houses, at reduced costs.

      For the blind, the access to information on the network, allow
him to read newspapers, send letters with quick answer, access to
videotext centrals, to do remote banking, to participate from
discussion lists, and so on.   This is particulary important: this
means culture !

      DOSVOX has built-in acess to the communications via fax-modem.
The project DOSVOX made an aggreement with the National Research
Network (RNP) of the National Research Council (CNPq), and it is
guaranted a free access to blind people to the Internet via phone.
An special program has been created (DISCAVOX) to ease the use of
electronic mail, fax transmission, newspaper access, bibliographical
research, and file transmission.  It's possible also to have access to
the World Wide Web, via the public domain program LYNX that gives
access to the text part of the pages.

     This could seem to be a very simple thing (and it is!), but very
few blind people in Brazil, have read (or better, listened by someone)
a newspaper in paper.  They often read Braille books and always listen
to the TV.  Somebody could say that there are news in the TV or in the
radio.  But this is information you can't choose: they come to you in
a packet and you must listen to everything, even what you don't want
to...  The written information is also, often, much more detailed.

      Via DISCAVOX, we are trying to have a significative set of the
blind community communicated, not only among them, but specially with
the "outside" world, the world of the non-blind.  The cost for this is
low for the user, as the communication service is free (except for the
telephone use).

      After only 3 months, DISCAVOX has today more or less 50 active
users, and 50 being trained.  The mean number of letters they receive
is between 5 and 10  (not counting the interest lists).  Many of those
letters came from non blind people, what is in total sintony with our
socialization ideas.

     In the last weeks there has been a big increase of new people
wanting to have access to DISCAVOX.  We have some limits, but we
expect to have 200 users at the end of 1996.  We don't know, however,
if the government (National Research Network) will continue to support
the free access to them.

      There is a big amount of blind people, however, that even having
access to cheap computers, haven't access to the telephone.  In
Brazil, the right for having a telephone is bought, and very expensive
(2000 dollars or more) !  For these people, DISCAVOX is being
installed publically (via another project of Sao Paulo University, the
RENDE Project), in libraries and rehabilitation centers, so they can
have access to the OCR technology (Scanner with Optical Character
Recognition), Braille printing and use of Internet.

5 - Conclusion

      DOSVOX has been created using brazilian technology, with very
low investment, low complexity, and adequate to the third world needs
and difficulties.

      The impact of DOSVOX system over the blind community is very
important, and can be easily evaluated by what is commented in
newspapers, radio and TV.  We expect that with the much wider use of
DOSVOX, a big step will be done to transform the so isolated blind
community of Brazil in a very active and participant group, productive
and integrated to the society.

      However, DOSVOX is only a tool.  To provide it can be really
important to the society, we need to begin immediatelly a set of
political actions that will allow the integration of the disabled in
the daily life, as we see in developed countries.  We hope that
successful blind people using DOSVOX, can serve as examples in the
future, to prove to the brazilian society that blind people can be
productive and useful human beings.
