"Imagine if your phone was in your pocket beeping at you and you couldn't take it out to see what was going on." That's how Betty Bird described one of the many problems she has with cell phones. Bird works for Lighthouse International, a rehabilitation facility for the blind or visually impaired.
The problem is, so much of the functionality of mobile phones relies on our ability to read what's on that tiny screen.
"I don't know that I've got a strong Internet connection or that my battery is dead and that's why I'm not getting good reception," Bird said. "I don't know if I got missed calls. My phone starts to beep, and it could be a missed call, it could be an advertising text message, it could be any number of things."
But the beeping mysteries are now being solved through software just unveiled called Mobile Speak.
"It's actually looking at the screen and reading it," Chuck Cohen of C Tech said.. "It's a screen reader. There are screen readers for computers that make computers accessible, and that's exactly the same thing. It has the ability to do redial and let you know who called, the number that called. When you push the buttons in when dialing the number it'll repeat the numbers to you as you're dialing it. It makes the Web information accessible so they can go to a Web site on their phone and get information."
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Cell phone
Phones are becoming more user friendly for blind people.
 
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Not only will the phone help blind and visually impaired people communicate more easily with others, if they get one with a camera built in, it'll also help them get dressed in the morning.
"It has a camera on it which will have a color identifier for the blind so they can point the camera up to a piece of clothing and it'll tell them what color the clothing is," Cohen said.
Mobile Speak is not available for all phones, just a handful of Nokia's on the AT&T, Cingular and T-Mobile Networks. The software costs around $300 if you install it yourself, and $400 to have it done for you.
Mobile Speak isn't the first screen reader for cell phones. There are two others called Mobile Accessibility and TALKS, but according to the American Foundation for the Blind, they don't provide access to all of a phone's functions.
