App Helps Macular Disease Sufferers Read ePubs
Scientists from the UK's Royal Holloway University are launching a new iPad app to help people with macular disease, a common cause of sight loss. People affected by the condition find it difficult to read normally, having lost their central vision. However, they can make use of their peripheral vision using a simple technique called eccentric viewing. The new app, called MD_evReader, is designed to enhance the eccentric viewing technique for reading eBooks. It enables users to scroll text from any ePub document in a single stream, like a news ticker. The text is presented into the reader's best point of eccentric vision and helps them to maintain a steady eye. The speed in which the text appears can be changed using a simple trackpad according to the reader's needs. The app also allows users to make changes to background and text color, and allows content to be displayed on digital television screens, enabling very large font sizes to be used.
Transcript
00:00:03 and then we can choose a book to read scientists from raw holay University are launching a new iPad app to help people with macular disease the most common cause of sight loss in the UK people with the condition have scars on their retina which block out the middle of their Vision if a person reads normally from left to right the scar will always block out the words with
00:00:27 training it's possible to learn to keep the eyes still and move the words through the unscarred part of the retina the new app the mdev reader is designed to help with reading ebooks it enables users to scroll text from any UB document in a single stream like a news ticker as well as change the font size type and color the success of the app relies on the cooperation of Publishers
00:00:54 who often use digital Rights Management DRM systems to lock Publications and prevent unauthorized copying in effect these prevent the mdev reader and other accessibility software from unlocking the publication and displaying content in the best way for the users Ivon is affected by macul generation and was involved in the testing
00:01:20 process I think it will help an awful lot actually because um a lot of people who are worse off than I am who were adamant readers of course no longer have anything available to them and so therefore they cannot they can't even probably sometimes see the text on the the televisions so I think it will be an enormous Advantage you can change the font you can change the coloring you've
00:01:44 got one line at a time um particularly with people with a steady eye technique trying to um read on one line and then going down to the next they often miss them whereas at least you've only got one line at a time well my my research interests are about eye movements and visual perception and so I'm aware a little bit about macular disease and the problems people will have and the idea
00:02:06 of the app came from seeing scrolling text on a train announcement board that announced each platform stop which is scrolling in the way that a news ticker does and I realized that that might help people with macular disease because it allows them to fixate in a certain location and allows the um words themselves to scroll into their best part of their peripheral vision so it
00:02:28 was as a reading aid for people with macular disease the main thing is it's for reading ebooks that's what it was developed for and the idea is that it Scrolls the text one line at a time and the speed of scrolling can be controlled using a trackpad on the screen so if the text becomes more difficult to understand you can slow it down um easier parts of text you can speed up so
00:02:49 you can suit the reading speed to suit you and the actual Tech material you're reading and it also allows you to change the color the background color font color and the font size so you can present present it in quite large fonts much bigger than you could do if you had an electronic reading device so when we when we developed the app the idea is to allow people to read ebooks but one of
00:03:10 the issues is that um electronic books are encrypted so that's it's a copyright protection for protecting the uh the author's rights which is obviously makes sense but the downside is that you are restricted to the types of viewing devices you can use so what we can only use the app for at the present time is books that are out of copyright and freely available so this tends to be
00:03:33 things like the classics like Great Expectations that's more than 100 years old and it's out of copyright but if you were to buy an ebook now from Amazon or wherever you wouldn't be able to use it on the app at the moment and what would' like Publishers to do is maybe change their digital rights copywriting software it's known as DRM so that the books aren't encrypted um in a way that
00:03:55 stops people from viewing the book in the way they want to depending on the the that they've got or the visual application they've got so we want a more lightweight DRM so that people can buy a book and then see you view it in the way they want to