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A new Raman effect: where no guide dog can go

Miguel Helft

An Indian’s pioneering work at Silicon Valley involving technological issues of accessibility and purposive customisation

— PHOTO: The New York Times

IDEAS THAT LEAD: Dr. T.V. Raman with his guide dog Hubbell and Charles Chen, left, at Mountain View last month.

MOUNTAIN VIEW: T.V. Raman was a bookish child who developed a love of maths and puzzles at an early age.

That passion did not change after glaucoma took his eyesight at the age of 14. What changed is the role that technology, and his own innovations, played in helping him pursue his interests.

Raman, from India, went from relying on volunteers to read him textbooks at a top technical university there to leading a largely autonomous life in Silicon Valley, where he is a respected computer scientist and an engineer at Google.

Along the way, Dr. Raman built a series of tools to help him take advantage of objects or technologies that were not designed with blind users in mind. They ranged from a Rubik’s Cube covered in Braille to a program that can take complex mathematical formulas and read them aloud, which became the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation at Cornell. He also built a version of Google’s search service tailored for blind users.

Dr. Raman, 43, is now working to modify a technological gadget he says could make life easier for blind people: a touch-screen phone.

“What Raman does is amazing,” said Paul Schroeder, vice president for programs and policy at the American Foundation for the Blind, which conducts research on technology that can help visually impaired people. “He is a leading thinker on accessibility issues, and his capacity to design and alter technology to meet his needs is unique.”

Some of Dr. Raman’s innovations may help make electronic gadgets and Web services more user-friendly for everyone. Instead of asking how something should work if a person cannot see, he says he prefers to ask, “How should something work when the user is not looking at the screen?”

Such systems could prove useful for drivers or anyone else who could benefit from eyes-free access to a phone. They could appeal to members of an aging generation with fading vision who want to keep using technology they have come to depend on.

For the broader public

Dr. Raman’s approach reflects a recognition that many innovations designed primarily for people with disabilities have benefited the broader public, said Larry Goldberg, who oversees the National Centre for Accessible Media at the public broadcasting station in Boston. They include kerb cuts for wheelchairs, captions for television broadcasts and optical character-recognition technology, which was fine-tuned to create software that could read printed books aloud and is now used in many computer applications.

With no buttons to guide the fingers on its glassy surface, the touch-screen cell phone may seem a particularly daunting challenge. But Raman said that with the right tweaks, touch-screen phones — many of which already come equipped with GPS technology and a compass — could help blind people navigate the world.

“How much of a leap of faith does it take for you to realise that your phone could say, ‘Walk straight and within 200 feet you’ll get to the intersection of X and Y?’” he asks. “This is entirely doable.”

“The overwhelming percentage of the industry really hasn’t stepped up to the plate to provide the blindness community with equal access to their products,” said Eric Bridges of the American Council of the Blind. He and others want accessibility to be built into technologies, not added as an afterthought.

People with other disabilities face similar challenges on the Net. “On the deafness side, the frustration is huge because of all of the video out there without captions,” Mr. Goldberg said.

Before joining Google in 2005, Dr. Raman worked at Adobe Systems and at IBM. He is intimately familiar with accessibility problems, personally and professionally. In 2006, he developed a version of Google’s search engine that gives a slight preference to websites that work well with screen readers. — New York Times News Service

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