Blind man creates app to hear colors

Being blind since age seven, Victor used his resources at the university where he was studying to find himself a solution.

It became a problem for him when, in 2004, the student had to read maps of the Earth’s upper atmosphere, when he had to do that task for his doctoral work, and he realized he wasn’t able to do it due to his condition.

The software has an image-to-speech feature that reads aloud the numerical values of the x and y coordinates as well as the value associated with a color at any given point on the image or map.

“Color is something that does not exist in the world of a blind person. I could see before... But there is no way that I can think of to give an exact idea of color to someone who has never seen before”, Victor explained.

Victor had the help of engineering student Ankur Moitra and research associate James Ferwerda.

"Tackling complex color images is only one problem out of many that blind scientists are facing. But I think this is a pretty important idea", Victor said.

Adapted from: http://www.cis.rit.edu/jaf/press/cornell_chronicle_012705_pg5.pdf

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