Kickoff Meeting, 1995 CSUN Conference

To all readers:

The following notes were transcribed from a tape recorded during this meeting. We apologize for any mis- representation of comments.

Mark

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CSUN 1995, Infrared Data Meeting, Friday, March 17th

Mark: First off I would like to thank you all for coming. My name is Mark Novak and I work at the Trace Center, located in Madison, WI. For this meeting tonight, I am going to be your co-host, with Neil Scott from Stanford and Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden of the Trace Center.

This meeting was organized to discuss the use of infrared (IR) technology, and how we might apply it to the field of assistive technology. We realize some of you are already using IR and what we would like to take a look at more specifically, is trying to gather your ideas and try to build upon those ideas to come up with a standard in this area, a standard that we might apply to access different types of electronic systems, computers, and all the things that are coming down the road with the "info-highway". So tonight's meeting is going to be an open discussion. There are a lot products in the computer industry already using infrared technology.

At Trace, we have started a list serve for the infrared discussion. Things like the notes from this meeting will be posted to the list serve, archived, and people can review and build upon that. This discussion can also continue on email for those of you on the internet. We can also continue through postal mailings, etc. We don't just want to do this tonight and let our momentum stop.

To get things rolling, we have a couple of speakers tonight. First off I would like to introduce Neil Scott from the CSLI Lab, which is the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford. Neil has done a lot of work with infrared technology in this field, for at least 5 years if not perhaps even longer. So I will turn it over to Neil.

Neil: I have been working for quite a few years now on a concept I started up calling Universal Access System, and I upset IBM by using that terminology and they got on my case, so I changed it to Total Access System. When they ask what it is, I say it is a universally applicable access system. The concept was to divide the problem that we were having putting stuff inside other people's computers into separating the access from the application. We were increasingly finding that we were getting all sorts of interactions when we put software or hardware into other people's computers and it was consuming a lot of their time. I was the person who set up all the hardware lab and stuff at CSUN and it became a nightmare just keeping all of that stuff current and going.

I got a grant to explore the concept of having some sort of personal access device that could interact with computers that have the standard port on them, that would accept whatever they happen to be and interact with me without me having to have any involvement in what the translation was, and the integral part of that was the infrared communication. The reason we started looking at infrared was that with the RF at the time we started, it was very expensive to get comparable sort of performance and with RF you don't know who is sitting on the other side of the wall that you may be able to be doing things involuntary to their computer, so we were looking at having the infrared providing a big part of the discrimination when you have a room full of equipment. The fact that the infrared beam can be kept to a defined code and allow you to essentially sit down in front of a device and know that is one you are talking to.

The original aim was to have a range of about 6' so that we thought was a good practical range to allow a person to get in a convenient position in front of whatever it was they are controlling and the limitations of the infrared until quite recently were that you had to get within about 3' to get any sort of band lift. So our first prototypes that I did about 4 years ago were sort of a discrete component devices that allowed us to have, I think at that point 4800 baud back and forth. So for the input side of things that was fine, but when we started looking at how to get information back from the device to the user, the 4800 baud becomes a real limitation. So we were looking at how to get the higher frequency. We got to 9600 baud using the same Sharp infrared modules that are used in the Newton and the Sharp Wizard. So there is a protocol layer that supports the 9600 baud quite well, but again only up to about 3'.

I pretty much got systems running with the Sharp modules. They were working out about $20 per module, just the cost of the infrared components, but they are self-contained complete little shielded module and they work pretty effectively. Each unit that we did, each transducer, transceiver was about a $50 component cost, so it is still more expensive than I really wanted. I knew that IRDA was starting to become active at that point that they were promoting a standard that would allow them to make a chip so I just shelved it until that came and in the meanwhile we started where were the problems that we have been having and actually using it in a practical sense.

The main problem was getting the alignment when a person was going to use something they had to pretty much visually line up on to the unit and get within proximity and so we started looking at how can we make this much more automated and the system we are working on now is based on the IRDA chip that has come out where you have multiple modes of operation, that has a TV mode which gives you 2400 baud at many tens of feet range, it is across the room type communication. There is the Sharp and Newton mode which is a 9600 baud at about up to 1 1/2-2 meters, and then they have a 11500 kilobaud which is the IRDA Standard, and that again is sort of more up to 3' type of range. And then they have a totally open port where you can just do your own thing which essentially, allows you to pass through the chip from your microprocessor directly to drive the infrared devices. So you have the freedom to create your own frequency if you need.

So the system that we have designed around that chip is based on actually using several of the modes at different stages of the interaction. In terms of getting started, who initiates the interaction, how do we stop the environment by being contaminated by infrared signals bouncing around everywhere. So we have been looking at the feasibility of using the key ring type RF unit as the trigger mechanism, that if you walk into a large area and you want to use the ATM machine, particularly for blind persons, you don't know where it is so this one of the considerations that we are looking at. How do we find the particular machine we want and so there is a class of our RF transmission that is unlicensed, provided that it is not a continual transmission, it doesn't carry audio, there is some other restriction I can't think of right now. Basically, it says you can use it to send out a signature that something we respond to which is precisely what the car alarm does.

Question: Is that in the all countries or just the States?

Neil: It's a low power device and I am pretty sure it is just one of those things that just floats in the spectrum that no one is that interested in. The regulations that I found were for the States, but from my understanding is that it is pretty much an international thing. It is low power, short range.

Question: range?

Neil: This one is about 70 something megahertz. But there are chips to do it. It can be done with very, very economical units and so what we were looking at is you have a transmitter in the device that is carried by the person that can send out a single burst that says I want to talk to a device of this type, and any device within the range of the transmission turns on the low speed infrared as a beacon and it starts transmitting. I say I want to talk to the Bank of America ATM, so there is a Bank of America ATM somewhere in the lobby of the hotel or wherever I am and it starts transmitting this beacon. So I then sweep around with my infrared device, and at some point like with your TV controller when you are pointing it at the TV it works and when you are not, it doesn't. Basically, it is sending out a Beacon signal that I will get a "beep beep beep beep" when I get on to it. At that point, it is up to me to start figuring out how I get to it. So the long range, low frequency signal is essentially the beacon that I can work now and at that point, the systems start negotiating saying I am going to send you a high frequency burst, do you get it. So we keep the long range, low frequency one as the return path and the device I am carrying sends out a test transmission that says, here is a burst of high speed stuff and the other thing is that I can't make heads or tails of it, come closer and so we do that until it says, "hey I can hear you." And so at that point you switch to the highest frequency which you are going to sustain which in most cases you switch to the 115 kilobaud and it will stay there.

If you break the system, someone walks in front of it or whatever, it just switches to the low one and starts over again and just says okay are we still talking and then bring it back up to a high speed again. So that overcomes a lot of the logistical problems of how do you log on to the system.

The protocol we have been working with once you are talking, the main concept that we worked on was that the device the person is carrying has no knowledge of the things you are going to talk to unless it is something that you talk to frequently, we put in a provision to say, "oh I know you because I talk to you every day." But in general, we need to be able to walk up to something in five years time that I've never seen hasn't even been invented yet and the systems need to be able to negotiate at that point, what do I need to know from you to be able to talk to you, so the low frequency thing will be the point at which they say I need this as a minimum working relationships. And the sorts of things we have been building into protocol are sending a map. If there is something that needs to know the layout of all the keyboards, say to make a mimic of the handheld device and then we send a map of the keyboard with the legends that are on the and then at that point we refer to common points on that keyboard or whatever it is we are representing. For the return signals I want an "A" that says press the key that is three down and two across on your keyboard. The knowledge of what the scan code is resides in the piece that is tied to the host device so I am not carrying around the device that is full of scan codes of IBMs and Macintoshes and SUNs and whatever else that resides in the device we are talking to.

So we are currently able to use that technique to talk to Silicon Graphics, SUN, PCs and Macintoshes basically from the same access device. You essentially are seeing exactly the same signals when it is a pointing function that we simply just say whatever your pointing device is move up and then it starts moving up. We really don't want to know if it is a Microsoft mouse or is it a tablet or whatever it might be.

So as far as the protocols that we are working on we are using pretty conventional air checking, negotiation of what information needs to be shared before we can start going into high speed mode and repairing the link if someone walks in front of it. Basically, we buffer things so that if you break the link, it just starts screwing stuff up and as soon as you walk out again it races and catches up with you. It appears to be pretty satisfactory as far as this point. We are still learning how to do some of the things properly, but our long term goal in doing this is that we need the high speed mainly for the return link when we start trying to send back information derived from the screen. We haven't done it yet but we are looking at making the low speed mode available when you want to control something from across the room, you just want to bring something up on the TV set and type a letter, then you can just work at low speed from keystrokes. But if you are doing full pad interaction with your computer and if you come close enough then you can use it.

That is basically where we are at. The cost is a big thing that has changed. The IRDA chips are about $5.00 compared to many tens of dollars that it was costing us to build units earlier. So I think it is going to become ubiquitous just because the cost is starting to be distributed over large numbers.

There was one other point I wanted to make. Everyone kept saying why don't you just use the Newton thing. With remote access to other devices there is a difference in the function that we are doing. With the Newtons and the Sharps and the notebook computers basically you are running a master slave system where they send you data and you run a mini application in your handheld or notebook computer and then you send back the data. So you are running a mini version of 1-2-3 or a mini version of a word processor. For a remote access, we are controlling the other device directly and so it requires a different interface at the host end. We have to interact with the keyboard and the pointing device directly and the way we do that we try to do it internally through the serial port and we just kept running into things that other people did to kill it. So you would get all set up and then you would run a program that decided that it owned the serial port and so the system we are using is a keyboard emulator, keyboard and mouse emulator at the hardware level and we are passing that information directly in line with the series with the existing keyboard and mouse and that is taking away most of the headaches that we use to have of other people being able to kill us.

On some of the keyboards you have to be real careful, because like on the IBM it can switch modes and so you have to actually do it very intelligent. You got to monitor what the keyboard is being told to do all the time. On others, the keyboard just seems to sit there and you can just enter what you want in there without problem but it certainly is working out to be the least interference doing it the way we have been doing it with feeding in through the keyboard and mouse. So at that point I will hand over to the next speaker. Any questions at this point about anything?.

Question about secure data transmission?

Neil: Not as yet. I talked with some people in the ATM about it and basically I am convinced that there is some very good schemes to use when it gets to where we need to, but at the moment we are not interfering with a lot of people because the spread of the infrared signal and the fall off is sufficient.

Question: The only suitable encrypting system would be some sort of public private system wouldn't it? When you are initializing a link with the system and you have some knowledge of you.

Neil: Basically, the ATM systems require half of it to live in your machine and half of it to live in their system. I think John Gill actually knows quite a bit about these sorts of things with the work they are doing. Is that not correct?

John: All I know is that there seem to many different organizations at least from the European side who are working in the infrared area all independent of each other. None of them realizing each other exists and utter confusion results. People starting from the "smart card" end of the business looking at a handheld wallet with an infrared link and that is the CAFE project in particular, there is 3, a very big consortium, really big industrial players. What I don't know is how much of they've standardized their infrared code. The ISO committee which is looking at standardization of the infrared signals to use by the disabled persons, ISO 22173?

Question: Does that include encryption protection?

John: I rather doubt it. I got a feeling it is much more concerned with the orientation and ????? of blind persons.

Neil: From what John has been telling me there is a lot more money being spent in Europe in this whole field and I think it would be real important to catch up on what is happening. John had given me some references to publications that are available and I am sure other people want them, what is the easiest way for them to contact you. Come and give you a card now. If you haven't seen the publications produced in Europe along this topic, they are quite comprehensive and the range of activities that are going on and there seems to be a lot more coordination then there is here.

John: There needs to be alot more coordination because we are starting from such shambles. Historically, we were umteen different countries in Europe working independent and we are still working in quite a large number of different languages. There is still nine official languages for the union.

Neil: Somehow we need to know collectively what happened there in Europe.

Mark: Thank you Neil. Next I would like to have Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden director of the Trace Center speak a little bit about the topic of infrared technology use and the sort of things that are being discussed at the Trace Center.

Gregg: Basically, the thing we are looking at is how the infrared technology fits into a larger strategy and that is particularly we have been focused on public information systems and also mass market systems, public meaning, kiosk, ATMs and those types of things. The mass market being the set top box, the information phones and other kinds of things where they are more like microwave ovens and VCRs then they are like computers, in that you can't go in and change them and fix them and add things to them. For both of those cases, both for public information systems, ATMs, etc. and for basic appliance like systems, we don't have the ability to retrofit them as easily as we do computers, then we have to build accessibility into them, so we have been doing a lot of work in terms of how do you build in access so that a person can just walk up and use them, and ideally we like to make it so that you can walk up and use them as they say "naked," without any types of special technologies to take with you. But there are individuals who have very severe disabilities, either they are deaf and blind, and it is difficult to put a braille display into every kiosk in every appliance in the world, or we have individuals with severe physical disabilities where it is hard for them to even get more, then you will, get into the locality. In these cases we are talking about having some type of a way for them to bring themselves augmented to these public systems and where they would be building directories or ATMs and to be able to operate them. In this case we need some way for them to connect.

There are two reasons that infrared technologies are very important for those situations. One of them is that you need to find something very inexpensive and very vandal proof, if you are going to get people to talk about putting them on public systems. This is a real issue. The other thing to look at is it is difficult for people, especially with physical disabilities, to manipulate connectors and so it is hard for them to plug into. For these two reasons infrared has become a very "examined" approach.

One of the issues about it though is that all the people that have been talking about infrared for a very long time, the tendency is to look at infrared because your constituency is people with physical disabilities and a different group is looking at it because their constituency is somebody who has visual impairments or blindness and then there are also people who are looking at the infrared because their constituency is "people in general" or too often people without disabilities, but we really want them to be thinking about is their constituency is everybody including people with disabilities.

There is a lot of people who have been working on different infrared standards, and Dr. Gill from United Kingdom is talking about all of the work that is going on in Europe with ISO, with the different standards and even there with the same standard organizations, you will find different groups working on different infrared standards that don't even know about each other. So what we need to do is if we are ever going to be getting infrared built into public systems and there is a lot of reasons to think that we can do that now, including the fact that the IRDA, the Infrared Data Association, has now 90 or so members in it, and looking at putting an infrared link into every personal computer and every PDA and every little pocket "doodad" so you can easily upload and download data and as soon as we start doing those kinds of things, we could say "gee wouldn't it be nice if they could go and recharge their pocket computer on an ATM with all of their own personal financial data" and other kinds of things.

There maybe ways that we can talk about getting the link into the systems, but why you are at it, why don't you just making so it will also do these other wonderful things for accessibility and if we are talking about $4-$5 worth of components, there seems to be a real driving force behind something that has been talked about amongst various different groups. Neil has been advocating this kind of an approach for quite a long time. To do it, though we have to start getting together and first of all identifying who all the players are in the infrared, just not in our little disability world, but in the general world. We have to identify who the infrared players are overseas, because we are no longer living in that provincial situation any more. If we are going to be doing this, you need to be looking at the ISO Standards, for absolute.

We need to get cross disabilities amongst ourselves when we go to the non disability world, we can't have some people coming at it saying you ought to do this and some people coming at it and saying you ought to be doing a totally different thing because we will get different people excited and then different people very discouraged and they won't have anything to do with us because we don't even know what we want. So kind of what we are trying to do is to begin a process at trying to identify.

We have two projects that we are working on at Trace that causes us to say that we need to have this information. One of them is the direct project with World Institute on Disability, Trace Center, and WGBH. We are suppose to be doing a study for NTIA, the electronic superhighway about how the next generation information systems will be accessible and we are suppose to be laying out how that is all suppose to happen and make recommendations. For infrared, we feel has got to be a part of it for individuals with more severe disabilities and yet we don't have anything that works across disabilities. We also have the Curbcuts projects which is looking at this as a public and the appliance and again we can either say," gee, we will talk about disability access but the people with real severe disabilities, that's okay we won't address them" and that is exactly the position we are yelling at for the regular market for doing and so we feel that it is untenable to be moving forward without looking at how we are going to be dealing with people with severe disabilities.

So we kind of got people invigorated or stepping out to say alright, since there isn't or there doesn't seem at least, we haven't been able to find any cross disability coordinated effort to actually make it happen, although when we talk to people everybody says, "yeah, yeah that is what I've been saying", that is like okay we are all saying the same thing and so can we together as a group try to address this and can we together as a group begin to identify the players and can we together figure out how to start causing this to gel.

I think a lot of us have been thinking about the need, a lot of us have been thinking about the pieces of the solution, some people have been working a lot more than others in the area and they can be good resources, but we need to either all contribute to the answer or supporting the people who are trying to move forward and see if we can't get something to gel. I think we are at a little window here. There is a lot of stuff that is gelling. There is ISO Standards and a lot of other kinds of things that are happening. If we wait 2-3 years, we are on the other end of it and the curbs are basically going to be poured and nobody backtracks with jackhammer stuff. I tell you if you think it is hard to get curbs jackhammered, it is almost impossible to have it done in the electronics field it gets on the far end of things.

So that is what this meeting is kind of about and that is the kind of thing we are trying to do is to act like a catalyst or magnitude draw to try to draw some of the forces and we know that, by the way, that all of the players are not here. This is a sampling of convenience of people interested in this and so one of the main things we can do is to try to identify some of the main players and other people in other places that would be involved in this too. And then we can approach it as if it is a nice simple, straightforward problem in which case we very naively will all run out of supplies half way on our campaign, because this is going to be a very difficult and long and complicated kind of thing. So we have to really try and use the best of all of our heads together to try and figure out what this is, where there are cross disability issues where we have to figure out how to do it so it will support all of the different disabilities along the same infrared link. Then we have to start marching.

That is where we are coming from on this end and why we are first stepping forward and try to get moving because if it doesn't exist out there someplace, we will have a very difficult time to try to present a picture, a unified package that doesn't leave one end of the population out.

Question: Regarding the FCC and IR bands?

Gregg: The FCC may be a player in a number of ways. First of all I should let you know that the chairman, Lee Hunt, is today giving a speech to the American Foundation of The Blind about such issues. Not infrared, but about accessibility. In preparing for that he spent a lot of time talking to a lot of people. He really is serious. As a matter of fact, he even has been known to say that he wanted to be the disability commissioner of the FCC. This is very nice to be hearing from the chair. It is going to be a very important time.

I don't know about frequency assignments. I think more of that will come from the field rather than the FCC. It is not like radio frequencies if you have to assign them quite the same way. More important, I would think, would be that as we talk about communication information systems, as these things are public and as they are telecommunication systems. All these kiosks are all tied in via bands to other places that they can fall into the jurisdiction of the FCC. I would really like to see some pressure toward their regulations that say if you are going to have these things out in the public, then they must be accessible to the public not just part of the public.

That won't happen, absolutely guaranteed that nothing will happen, if there is not clearly in existence solutions that people agree on. I don't mean necessarily that all the industry says we want to go do this. But at least within the disability community there has to be something. There can't be three different disability communities arguing how something ought to be done because that is great cover. Nothing will happen because no one is going to start picking one over another.

If this is going to happen and there is lots of places where it might, it is only going to happen if as a community we have some standards and some approaches and some agreement about how we are going to do something. So it is just sort of lying there and all it needs to do to be implemented, and then we can begin to see somebody stepping in and saying "gee, we ought to be going ahead".

That may or may not involve actually going through a standards process and if it does that scares the heck out of me. There are a couple people in here, member of the Canadian Standards Association and worked on standards via that mechanism. We have done stuff through ANSI, through RESNA. John, you are on the standards committee for ISO, so I think it might be another good topic to sort of toss out. That can be a long and tortures route. You can create standards that get put into practice that later jell. Just making sure we have all of the different aspects and all of the players working together rather than separately.

The FCC connection is a very important one. I hope that Lee Hunt is around long enough for us and him to converge here.

Neil: I think maybe one of the functions of having a list serve is to really start gathering, just how are you using infrared or how have you proposed to use it and what people are thinking.

Gregg: As we think about it, I almost wonder where in the Tech IR list different from an IR list because there may be some technical discussions that spin off into the ozone and as we will have to before we get to the end of this. There will be a lot of other people that want to promote its use and the general specifications who will sign off. The thing I keep hearing we have talked about list serves on this and the first thing you always ask me, "is there much activity on that list serve", and so you say it is kind of low right now, so then you say okay I'll sign up.

My e-mail is between 150-200 pieces a day, so a lot of people feel that they just can't get on a list serve because it is too deep so we end up dividing it up later. But, yes I think the list serve is a prime opportunity to put all this stuff in because then it gets archived automatically so we can begin trying to find out what all of the dimensions are and people's different proposals and start trying to find a common ground across the globe. Because you can do stuff in meetings and stuff like this, but when you want to do international, then things like the list serve really come to shine because they really allow participation and they also allow participation by our colleagues who either aren't in our field enough that they come to our conferences or they just can't afford to come. There are really some great people that we know that aren't here tonight, because they couldn't get to one more conference. Are there people that are not on Internet here?

Question: I would like to thank you guys at the Trace Center bringing everyone together and trying to do this. It appears to me in thinking about it that one of the starting points is get it together as much information as we can about who is using what. When we started using infrared for talking signs, nobody else was using infrared and we had the entire spectrum to ourselves. We ended up choosing 25 kilohertz, which may or may not be the best frequency for that, but I think if you gather together all the "who is using what now". Anyway as soon as we generate a picture of what is out there we'll have a starting point and know more or less what is compatible.

Gregg: You bring up another good point and that is when we are talking about accessing kiosk, we are talking about a control and information link. So that you can control the device and get information from the device. But there is another one that is very closely related to this which is the broadcast which basically your talking sign. As was pointed out, it won't do me any damn good to have a kiosk that is accessible by people who are blind if I don't know that it is even there. Not that I can't find it, I don't even know that it is there. So when you go to conferences and say like when you came into the LAX, how many people noticed all of the kiosks that were out at the airport and of course a lot of the people who were blind and somebody would say, "you know, I heard somebody doing something over there and I was wondering what that was, it must have been a kiosk", because I this sort of activity and they couldn't categorize what the person was doing from the noises but pushing on a television screen would make perfect sense to what they were hearing this person do. But most of the other people didn't even know they were there. So this broadcast function as well as the data linkage are actually two that they need to get.

Gregg: People have also asked for a little tiny LED to be sitting next to every LCD in the world. That would just broadcast ASCII and you literally put a sensor over the top of this thing and it will then tell you what is on the display and you can make just a really little brain dead chip that would read off. You can spell it out. LCDs usually don't have a whole lot of stuff, such as statuss on the phone. That may be different. It is not like we need to come up with one seven layer hierarchy infrared by- directional and that is going to be it. It think we need to think of this spectrum and whether or not we are talking about one or two or three kinds of things.

Question: It goes by the wavelength too.

Gregg: We have two frequencies.

Neil: Basically, the wavelength is going to dictated to us by the mass production of the devices. The low cost is going to come from adopting the things that are already in all of the devices that are around.

John: There are things coming up now where it is becoming very inexpensive to make very narrow wavelengths optical filters. And along with that there is more infrared diodes that are gradually emerging with slightly peaked point and you are absolutely right that all of those are becoming expensive and we have to use what is out there. I think we should foresee at least the possibility were we will be able to carve up chunks of the actual wavelength. I think they are quite narrow wavelengths. Get one of those allocated.

Question: ......get it's own house in order and get something adopted by way of a standard even if it is informal.

Gregg: I think the question about is there a competing presumes that we are trying to create are own that would compete. If there was one out there that did something like what we are looking for, then that is what we want to tie into and cause to maybe be enhanced to provide what we need. I hope there is no NIH, not invented here, thought in the room, this is something we have to do our own thing. IRDA is, and we need to explore it. Neil has been looking at is some already and it is not necessarily an easy question but I really think if IRDA which has got most of the laptop manufacturers and the little PDAs and everything else on it is coming up with a standard that is probably going to be the one that we are going to be looking at because it means that people with disabilities could then use laptops with the infrared they already have built in and some assistive technologies sort of like we are getting half of the system handed to us.

Question: There are other ways of using the spectrum to transmit data but my question is are there other technologies that are likely to emerge that the laptop and PDA industry might instead decide it will be better for them.

Neil: Some engineers that I met with at National SemiConductor were pushing very hard for the 900 megahertz RF. Apparently, they have chips and modules for making this very economical now. But I think that if they move too late whatever they do with RF will supplement and it may be that will be the channel that you use for sending back high speed data from a screen or something. It seems like the infrared is established in all of the PDAs, the printers, notebooks, whatever even destroy system. It maybe competing in one particular area, but I don't think it will be something.

Gary: There is a project at Xerox Park. Computing project where the idea is to have lots of computers per person. Lots of small ones, medium sized ones, large ones, blackboard size ones and they use both infrared and the RF you just referred to and they found out they really needed the RF, these little micro-cellular links to do what they want to do because of the line of sight constraint. That is a research project, there is no momentum there it is probably a longer term thing.

Gregg: We need to separate two areas. One of the is networking. When you want to get on network, that is a lot of what they are talking about. When you walk into a room, you become automatically connected to an ethernet. High speed, you don't want it when you turn around your computer stops working, or you have to aim it at the ceiling or you stick it in a draw and it won't work and things like this. That is where they are looking at a lot of the RF kinds of things.

In the IR if we are looking at something that is more of a data transfer and also there is a close issue that you need to be looking at and even security issues in terms of broadcasting RF you can broadcast something that is not going to go very far. Although I think with the smart card you found that basically oviating that with encryption and things like that and they are just assuming that we can't do anything that can't be tapped so, therefore, you should make it so that it doesn't do any good to tap it with a signal or something.

John: Basically, in the smart card area you would contact smart card like a conventional card, contact less. With a close contact disk which is what the banking community and the public transport uses. The banking community are limited it to about 10 centimeters and using a lot of encryption for security purposes. Then you have a distant contact list which typically works 5 or 10 meters and tend to be a much lower security work. For cars or parking first find your terminal for a blind person that sort of application.

Question: How many meters was that 3?

John: 5-10 meters.

Mark: We have a number of other developers in the room and people I believe are already using infrared. Is there something we should be bringing in?

John: In the UK they are using 250 Khz frequency for the audio description services at the movie theater. Also the 95 KHz system for helping the hearing impaired.

Gary: The Sharp Newton is 500 KHz. It's pulse width, it's bare, it's not modulated at all. I hate it. I think it is the stupidest thing. What happened is the Sharp protocol and HP. HP had this on/off pulse width and Sharp had this 500 KHz modulated thing with a tight filter to reject ambient noise and they fought in the committee and HP won. We just announced new augmentative communication products here at the show that have built-in IR, we have an infrared keyboard emulator and built-in infrared learning ECU and we are using the Sharp part and IRDA is the standard, if you can go faster, but it is bare.

Gregg: You can go faster with the IRDA?

Gary: Yeah, and that is what really caused it to win in the committee. What we understand is we are shipping products with infrared LEDs and there is a processor with software and we can pulse them and send anything. What we look for from a very pragmatic standpoint is just access knowledge to the protocols and standards that our users need to talk to whatever it is. Talk about TVs, VCRs, to just find out what to send to the wide assortment of consumer electronics that exist, that is a very difficult thing to do.

Gregg: That is the environmental control you are talking about?

Gary: Yeah, and what I hope as a minimum we can communicate to the big boys of the world is to at least tell us what they are doing. Because if they tell me, I can pulse my LEDs anyway they want and I can receive anyway they want. It is a software issue. But with the consumer electronics stuff, that information is not terribly widely available. It is available in little pockets. It is 39 kilohertz. Actually is 38-43 kilohertz, depending on the manufacturer. It is modulated. Someone said you can get around 2400 bawd out of it. But the data within that, you can find it on a couple of manufacturers and nothing from other manufacturers.

Now the Universal Remote people have gone out and dug out that information and put it in the $50 retail, even a watch that with the universal. We are cheating. Because it was too much work to go out and find every code in the world. So what I am looking for is to at least as a minimum have people tell us what they are doing so that I can then write software to go talk to them.

Gregg: Perhaps one of the things we can do as part of this effort is to set up an IR registry that just says every use of IR that we know of and have in it what people have contributed.

Gary: On sci.electronics on the net, about every 25 days there is a post from somebody new that says, hey does anybody have a list of all of the infrared codes for the consumer electronics stuff that is out there. It comes like clockwork. There still isn't anywhere on the net that I have found, this depository of what is there. A lot of stuff that we have collected everybody collects bits and pieces. Put it in one spot it might help.

Gregg: It would be helpful. Sometimes people after they spend all the time collecting it becomes a competitive edge. Other times people say gee I will give our competitive edge if you will save me the grief of having to look for the parts I haven't found yet. But I think we can certainly setup an IR registry and it will only be as good as what everybody contributes in. I think that would be a good starting point.

Question: Many of the programmable remote devices come preprogrammed with like 500 or more devices if you can recall automatic configurations for it. Something like that must have a pretty good list?

Gary: For consumer electronics, right. We tried talking to some of those and never have quite gone through. But that is just TVs and VCRs and that is kind of a small piece of what we are really trying to get at here. They are all modulated 38-40 kilohertz whatever that is worth. That you can count on.

Question: The CE Bus has an IR protocol. Is that different or the same as IRDA?

Gregg: Guaranteed, different. The IRDA as I understand it. The closest thing to that is the HPIL bus. They did some modifications to that in committee and stuff.

Neil: What I was trying to scope out where to go. The main feedback I was getting in terms of the HP bus and the IBM proposal where people were getting trapped and bogged down with trying to implement the seven layer protocol on something that really doesn't need it and this is where a lot of the committee people were just shrugging their shoulders and going on doing their own thing. Because it was the networking side of it not the infrared part that was starting to cause all the argument, so that is another aspect of how you are going to use it. What are the protocols going to be in terms of how many layers do we really need and how will we use them. I think getting standardization in that are going to be a real critical part of it.

Question: Do you volunteer to start a registry of that sort?

Gregg: We will put it up on our network. And people make suggestions. There will be an infrared branch if you will on the Web, Gopher, and FTP so you can come at it any of the three ways and we can put the stuff in there and we will organize in whatever way looks to be the most logical for the information that we have and if you have ideas like do X, Y, Z send those along too and we will all be able to look at it. It will live and change as we get different pieces of information. I think there will probably be one IR standards, IR applications this sort of category. We will just try to stick all the documents in there as we find it.

Neil: DO you have the resources to have someone say stuff that is coming in and try to keep one document up to date. One document to look at instead of trying to look at a bunch of documents?

Gregg: We will try to make sense out of it.

Neil: We are making live easier tonight for some sort of format to keep the applications, bonk, frequencies, bonk, carrier, bonk, etc....

Gregg: If people are sending in bits of information that we can fill into a chart, we will fill it into a chart.

Neil: Just filled up a list and put something in order so we can scan down that list and see if there is duplicates.

Gregg: I thought what you were saying is if we take all of the standards document, if there are any IR and all the articles that everybody wrote about IR will we be maintaining a short synopsis.

Neil: That is not what I mean. If we agree to make it roughly a format so we can put it into one document.

John: If you can identify even just the committees looking at this area and the name of the chairman, the chairman's email address because basically the committees may have surveys themselves. That would be a first good step.

Gregg: Any public documents that we can get in electronic form. Public meaning publicly disseminal so we don't get hung when somebody finds that we put one of these standards up on there that they sell for $200. If we can't then we can try to put up a synopsis or description of it as well as an order form for it. So that if you want to get it you can download it, fill it out, and send it in.

Gregg: As a group there may be stuff we can do too.

Marie: .......I think that it is a dirty rotten shame that we have product sales here that are easily accessing many many things from atrium to transit buttons and ADA is not helping with that. So I came here to say everybody call Access Board and tell them you want audible timing written into the ADA.

And the company that was known as Verbal Landmark is no longer, because I bought the company. It is now called Sound Advice Systems. We give you advice through sound. And we are working with AT&T and Depot on ATM to make them accessible. And we are working with some transit authorities to start putting it in transit stations. So we are there. We use 8 KHz.

Question: Are you using RF.

Marie: Yes.

Gregg: So, I thought you said you were in RF and now you are doing IR.

Marie: We are in RF but our receiver can also pick up IR. We can do both.

Gregg: How many other IR manufacturers are there at this time. Do you know?

Marie: I am not aware of any IR manufacturers other than Ward Bond with Talking Signs, that is the only one I am familiar with. As far as what I am doing. As far as I know, I am the only one doing.

Gregg: Ward was here last year, some of you may remember him. He had a number of talking signs set up around the conference so you could use his systems and go find things.

Marie: I think the difference between what we do with our receiver versus an IR receiver, is that you don't have to hold it. You can have it in your pocket or in your purse and get your information without having to wand it because it is not a line of sight. That is the main concern that I have is the line of sight, because when you are going down the steps into a subway and you have a dog and briefcase and a token in your hand is it very difficult to also be wanding to find the information that you need. That is why I like the radio frequency.

Gregg: After we get finished, I will be interested for how you see direction finding. Okay. Other IR areas. Do you have a question?

Question: ...the access board.... They are looking at the industry through a task force as I understand it. One more source of people looking at standards and I know we have held them up on doing?

Marie: I brought you the information that I came from Washington, D.C. and the ATM taskforce has put together its recommendations and they are turning them in by the end of this month. Also, I have the recommendation from the ??? taskforce and they are turning those in at the end of the month as well. So I think it is very important that some of us make sure that we ask for inclusion of audio other than the ear jack.

Question: For clarification, both I believe are ANSI taskforces.

Marie: Yes, both of those are ANSI taskforces.

Question: ANSI is beginning its process for the access standards?

Question: Those two that she just mentioned are the MCA??? 117. That ANSI committee will begin its revision work for '96 or '97 standard, sometime this summer.

Marie: I can give you the notes that I brought back from D.C.

Gregg: We have Talking Signs, we have Neil's work, we have the work from the 2 or 3 committees/workgroups in Europe, we have a couple of IR, basically IR, RS232, we have one upstairs. How many different IR RS232 manufacturers do we know of? Anybody name one? What is the name of the one we have down in the lab, control bits.

Gregg: IR networking company, IR LANs. Are there any RS232 at this time.

Neil: I do have the datasheet but I just can't remember the name.

Gregg: Okay. Anybody aware of any other? We will take on our computer shopper and try and find the IR LAN people that we can ID. As you are going through your EE Times and PC Weeks and stuff like this, when you see things like that you can always just stick them in a fax machine to us and just write Mark or something across the top of it and stuff it in the fax machine. The fax machine that we have drops right in our main office, so it is not like it is one off some place. You don't have to put fancy coversheets or anything else on it. Just tear a page out of a magazine, stuff it in the machine with someone's name on the top and it will get to them.

Questions: What is the fax number?

Gregg: 608-262-8848. A lot of times you want to send stuff but it is just too much work to write a letter and send it off, so just stuff it in the machine. We will take that information and put it into the charts, put it up in the network and then it will be available for everyone in accessible form.

Frank: What about the bar code readers and the auto focusing cameras are they are anything different. Different wavelengths, different frequency?

Gregg: I guess we have to figure out if it is not. We are interested in things that might interfere. I was thinking about the camera particularly. I don't know the answer. It is an interesting question. Have somebody take a picture. It's not even the flash, just the focus system. Any other IR users?

John: The traffic one that is coming up. Intelligent highway those people are working on IRs and talk about spectrum which would be good or bad. It actually wouldn't matter, if the industry decided to use spectrum for everything as long as we could reserve some kind of code that would be fine to.

Question: Laser pointing devices?

Gregg: They are not IR. They may generate IR. John the smart card things, they are mostly RF?

John: Mostly RF, but the CAFE projects are infrared. That is the handheld wallet. I will give you the contact, what his name and address is.

Gregg: That will be an interesting thing if the LCD IR thing we talked about instead of transmitting ASCII. It transmitted an audible signal at the infrared headphones, to access you would just have to go to Radio Shack instead of buying a disability access device, you would go to Radio Shack and buy a $10 headphone.

Question: The idea of having a LED on every LCD is very appealing.

Neil: It brings up a totally different thing. Microsoft and Timex has done, is there something we should be grabbing on to. Precisely what you are saying getting a little LED module. Very short range thing......

Gregg: Somebody else mentioned something earlier that I want to bring back up that sort of came and went. We are all talking IR, but the comment was should we be just shutting our minds off and just focussing on IR or maybe we should still keep and things like that and although I think there are a lot of things pointing to IR right now, I think it would be useful to always keep our minds open so that we don't get stuck in the IR link and then when a bunch of circumstances that would have caused us to switch over we don't' recognize it because we have been talking IR so long that we become too focussed and insensitive to what the advantages in the other directions may be. It maybe that somebody will come out with some technologies and really make sense in the other direction. So we can leave that on the table.

Neil: National is really is pushing RF. They are investing a lot of money to crank their cost down lower and lower.

Gregg: Which one are you talking about.

Neil: The National RF.

Neil: They are looking for people to pick up this RF and it is a good chance that someone will. That is another diversion. Another thing is, for very direct communication some of the laser diodes are starting to become low enough in cost that they are probably going to be used for very high frequency data transmission and become something that is feasible. So we have to keep that in mind. The IR maybe one direction and either the RF or laser in the other direction.

Mark: We have about 20 minutes left. Neil and his introduction talked about an initiation type protocol and how do you find it type of scenario possibility. Does that sound feasible to some people? Does anyone want to add to that.....

Gary: I guess where we come from, we will follow but we would like to be able to follow. I know agencies are going to be doing public phone booths with IR so you can point your PA at it and it will go off dial the phone, etc. I want for them is to tell me how I can talk to that. Those kinds of things. One of the things you mentioned here is the whole kind of advocacy issue and I guess I am kind of interested where Trace is on that. I know you guys have contacts with a lot of the big players. If you have any thoughts about people that might actually listen to what our little world is interested in. Are there some that might listen better than others that you found in your travels. Does everybody not care? Do you have any sense for that?

Gregg: We are almost not visible on the radar screen. But it doesn't mean that they don't care. However, there are a lot of things that you care about, but when you get to the office how many people have gone in the morning and there is something that was very important that you had to have done at the end of the day, you went home and it wasn't done. You went in the next day and you went home and it still wasn't done. And you sit at the end of the day and say how could I have not of gotten to this thing. You think back to how your day was and now think of something that somebody else thinks is important that they have convinced you that you should have gotten done today and it doesn't get done. It is just always on your to do list. If we can figure out and make it so it is not a hard thing to do, that is a big thing. Because a lot of times we don't get stuff done because we just don't have that big of time window. We can also do it by trying to make it more important and that is where standards, pressure,....

Gregg: You said AT&T is making phones with infrared. Is that something you know or is it something you were just using as an example.

Gary: It's not shipped yet but it will be. So you can point your PDA at a public phone and select Mr. Jones, and your PDA goes off and transmits it to the public phone dial.

Gregg: I understand. It's great. I would like to be able to do that. Who is the contact person. Do you know anything about that?

Gary: Let me pull what I know about it out of my files. I will dump my files on my desk and then mail and fax whatever I have on it. But I have also talked to people at Sharp. That is what I have been told, but then there was this selection and blessing of the HP protocol for IRDA so I am not clear what they have done with that. Actually the people at IRDA. Has anyone here called them, they have an e-mail address. There are some people there that are reasonable.

Mark: I've corresponded to them once or twice through e- mail.

Neil: I think it is probably worth our time trying to get that and actually see and say look this group has gotten together and we would really like to get closer.

Mark: I was trying to get IRDA to tell us when their next meeting was.

Gregg: The trouble was that it came at the very last minute.

Gary: Apple has a big disabilities group and they are members. Maybe we can get in through the Apple disability group into the IRDA or something like that. Maybe they could sponsor our membership or something like that.

Gregg: If we are really going to do something. There is going to be more effort put in by all of us than the amount of money they are asking to sit at the table. We will find the funds someplace to cover that aspect.

Neil: If we have something to say when we get there.

Gregg: Yeah, if we have something to say when we get there.

Gregg: Now you just sort of dropped this AT&T having the IR stuff. Is anybody else aware of anything else. Or are we aware of anything else like that. That is a public information system with an IR link. This is exactly what we are talking about trying to have happen. The question is when the phone comes out, will it do everything except allow a person with a physical disability using it. It could be very close and just miss that one last piece. Or a blind person could do it except it will do everything in the world, exchange information, run all this protocol but it won't tell you what's on the screen of the phone. It could of if, we would have only thought of that. That is the kind of thing we need to find out if we are early in the process. So I will try to track this down.

Question: In relationship to the IR infrared. I saw a drawing mouse type thing with a pen that the engineers have and when they are doing their plans and doing their plan checks they were using IR technology for locating where the pen was, for doing erasers, for doing marks and other things like that. They can set the plans down, set their two points and be able to track where the pen was for making different types of markings they needed to do. It is really a fantastic demonstration. So it is being used by the engineer field quite a bit.

Question: What frequency are they using for the cordless pointing devices?

Question: Basically, a copy of the Pointer Systems mouse. I just wanted to know what kind of frequency they were using. How much interference of those sorts of devices are going to cause.

Gregg: Right, not only what they need to do because if we are talking about using this in the disability areas and the rooms are swamped with IR frequency you would be looking for infrared.

Gary: He has a booth here. Ward Instruments, we can walk up and ask him.

Gregg: Another table entry.

Question: Slightly off the topic in terms of devices. The one that we get most questions about where I am is synthesizers and data displays and the idea of having an infrared LED. In other words talking about textual information. People who are blind, certain segments of the community are very frustrated about music synthesizers in particular, because they can't pursue musical interests in a competitive way, and we are talking about infrared LEDs in those display devices.

Gregg: You are talking about people who are blind are concerned because synthesizers, and electric pianos they use IR?

Question: No, they want them to use IR because there is a specific class of fully mainstreamed. They are very specialist.

Gregg: You would like them to use IR for what?

Question: To convey display information to some sort of separate device.

Gregg: So you are talking about they have a little LCD displays and they would like to do is have a parallel IR to transmit the information. Neil from our staff is very interested in that. He spent a long time mastering his system which has an electronic display.

Gregg: We passed a memo pad around, I think for sign up. If anybody has come in since this passed around and didn't get signed up on it, either sign up or hand us a card or whatever.

Mark: We kind of touched on pretty much the entire agenda, we talked alittle bit about some linkage protocols. We have been on advocacy issue. Is there anything else that people wish to discuss?

Question: Not to overburden Trace with the collection, Gregg since you started about the RF. Can you add RF and other kinds of openings that might be explored for communication that would be similar to what we are talking about.

Gregg: We will watch for and will certainly post anything that we can. We will also collect, post, and log anything anybody else sends in. We will put a branch that says other related non-IR and in there it will have a folder that we find on RF and laser and whatever else that people send in. By the way if you have or you see an EE Times thing that really is a good description of somebody's technology and things and instead of faxing it you would really do us a favor and just type 12-20 sentences into an e-mail and send it to us. It just makes it a thousand times easier for us to post that on the network. If you say well I am going to fax everything in. If it is gee I am never going to get around to e-mailing it, then fax it to us. But if you send an e-mail it is real easy for us to get it to everybody else.

Or even post it yourself to list serve and then everybody can see it and we will try to take the really good stuff that gets faxed to us and put it up. But if you take a little extra time, count the number of people in the room here, the people in the IR project from Trace are all here, and we are a lot less energy than all of us combined, so we will try to take a lead on this and help us when you see things, that's great. But for heavens sakes don't leave it lay on your desk for 3 weeks or 6 months because you really want to do us a favor and e-mail to us and then we never see it.

Davy: It would be very helpful to start determining at least the technology so that those of us who manufacture especially if we have some IR capability already to try to put the equipment in so that once if even if we don't have all the protocols and so on at least if we have the hardware there we can simply update the products through the software.

Gregg: If you want a best guess, I think, and everybody else shake your head yes or no. Our best guess at this time if you are talking IR you are probably talking IRDA.

Davy: That is sort of my impression as well.

Gregg: You will find out if the AT&T is something else and they have thought they were going to disseminate all this stuff and they have set it up to talk to PDAs and they must know something that we don't know about who's PDA is going to communicate with it. And that would cause me to stop and think. I would be very surprised at this point if it was anything but because they are not making PDAs.

Neil: ....The general magic protocol on the Sony devices like AT&T and it is a good chance that whatever that is what the standard will be.

Question: What was the competing standard?

Neil: Sharp. Yeah, Sharp. AT&T had a big display of the little Sony general magic and it had infrared it looked like a Sharp thing. A girl was demonstrating it and somebody accidentally turned off the display in front so it works for over 20 or 30 feet. They had this huge multi-media display and half the screen was turned off.

Gregg: You said it looked like Sharp. Does a Sharp look different?

Neil: It is a little PDA type thing that Sony put out but AT&T is the funding people so we should try to find out more information about that because that is probably what their telephone use because they are trying to push people to get on to their standards.

Gregg: So, this was a Sony?

Neil: This was a Sony device but AT&T were behind it.

Question: HP is going to be shipping printers will soon with built-in IR.

Gregg: I heard 2 or 3 different portable computers now have all have IR. The new powerbooks have IR in them.

Question: and the IBM Thinkpad.

Gregg: So we need to figure out where they are and try to backtrack.

Gregg: Is anybody from IBM here?

Gregg: If you see any of the IBM people just ask them if they would be the person to talk to about the IR in the portables that might be a good thing to do.

Question: I saw a reference that Windows '95 is going to have an IR portion to the APIs.

Mark: I am trying to chase that right now.

Question: Is it IR or IRDA?

Question: I heard it was IRDA.

Gregg: If you looked at the list of the 60 or 90 IRDA members. It looks like a whose who. Anything else we are missing?

Neil: The connections they are making from the infrared at the moment is that the data string and get good control of devices remotely software drivers incorporate them has to be hardware linkage that takes us back into the very low level so we don't get interference when we are trying to drive remote programs. Same as going through the keyboard port. Go back. Trying to interact as a remote control of a computer running software, you are at the mercy of all the different softwares to whether you maintain control of that thing under open. I started off trying to control things through the serial port having drivers, but every now and then you would come across something that essentially killed your link through the serial port and so we have been going in through the keyboard and mouse port actually emulating the physical devices so we can remain independent of that.

It seems that all of the PDAs and all the software that goes with them is basically RS232 type level and requires corporation from the device that you are working with. One of the things I have been pushing for is there is essentially a parallel data that you like that goes deeper down in the so that it actually comes in looking like a low level driver. Because the mouse in particular is very difficult to emulate from above because there are things that happened in the driver that you don't have access to that makes you rewrite the driver and so getting at the front means you can emulate everything. Getting it part way through can't click the button.

Gregg: This is where we really need to be getting corporation from the people who make the original device. It is like Windows '95 which has our SerialKeys as part of Windows '95 so you now use a serial port and it will give you access to the keyboard and mouse at the lowest level. You can do a control, alt and delete which has to be because that is the control, alt, delete patch is at the lowest level of the software there is, so that it will work most of the time. So you actually have to get down into the keyboard driver.

Neil: Somehow we have to get that information out to the people who make all of the devices. Equivalent to what you just said.

Gregg: We want to have it built-in so that the standard part. This is almost application level software when you are talking about an ATM or kiosk or something like that. It is not like you have to build into the operating system because they are writing a bunch of applications. The basic software running the overall system if we can just get it so that part of it is built-in as the links you are talking about, again we can't talk to them about building it in until they can say exactly what it looks like.

It's like we never got SerialKeys built into anything until after we had functioning SerialKeys essentially patches in this area we can't patch. I tried patching an ATM and I should get the anklets off my foot any day now! You can't go patching into the ATM. So we will have to try to do some really good work on paper and simulation. We are going to have to go demonstrate. We are going to have to talk to them and/or we are going to have to find some ATM manufacturer who is willing to step forward maybe as a part of the same kind of thing AT&T is doing. Where someone is says, " gee we want to do this for PDAs and we allow them to think about this".

I will tell you that ATM is one of the ones that is most scared of having any kind of connection of any kind to it because they are worried that some brilliant hacker will figure out how to hit the return key 2000 times in a second and open up a door.

Marie: That is why they like what I am doing, because I only interpret the screen. There is no way I would get into their equipment at all. I just interpret the screen. I am not the engineer in the company, so I don't understand that. But we have worked with AT&T and Depot, who have set up their equipment and they know you can't get through from the outside in, we can only send out, we can't send in.

Gregg: And that won't be good enough if we have control for both blindness and physical disabilities.

Marie: But this will do both.

Gregg: What will do both?

Marie: People who have low intelligence can use this as well as people who have visual impairments.

Gregg: If it is only one direction, and the person can't use the keypad or the touchscreen, you can't get back in again. It would probably only be the people with physical disabilities, because with good feedback out, you can use for deaf/blindness, you can use the feedback.

Gregg: What are the down sides. What are all the reasons why we could fail?

Gregg: I am going to repeat these. I want to make sure that we haven't run out of tape. Loss of momentum, lack of a central cohesive vision of the purpose, unrealistic goals, reluctance to make decisions. That becomes our backup procedures. International diversity of approach, industry diversity of approach. The Smart Cards, for example, are dealing with RF except for the electric purse. Lack of resources. Three people at Trace, lack of resources.

Neil: What is a reasonable time to have people think about I really must get my contribution in by a month or what?

Gregg: Let's pick May Day. That gives you a little bit more than a month. If we don't get moving on this. This isn't a kind of thing where let's talk about it again next year at CSUN. This stuff is gelling. AT&T come out with their phone and stuff like that, that means that we are already way too late for that kind of thing. Unless an agency has been doing a lot of stuff around access.

Gary: Well, we are starting with an information clearinghouse project. Among all of us we probably could collect a lot of pieces fairly quickly. They are already approaching IRDA and Microsoft. That's a good start. Try to keep knocking on those doors. It sounds like we've started. That's great.

Gregg: Neil has been looking at this for sometime and he is right out in IRDA's backyard.

Question: I think Ron Attley at AT&T is reasonably into disability access coordination.

Gregg: Yes, Ron Attley would be a good one. I should give him a buzz.

Question: The other group that we probably should make contact will is the games manufacturers because a lot of them have a lot of money going into handheld devices for the game industries.

Question: That is another one. Nintendo and some of those companies.

Gregg: Another huge one. We should do is to have a registry of set top box manufacturers. There is going to be a massive number of little boxes sitting on top of TV sets and people are going to have little control panels for all these information services. One place had an order for 300,000 set top boxes. Contract they had at 300,000 installed within 12-24 months. There is some interesting things moving forward. Those are all going to be infrared.

Gregg: Do we really have a good list of the different consumer populations and the different uses that this protocol would have to cover. Did you talk about that. For example, for people who are blind we need to be able to represent the information that is on the screen so that is one way.

We may have to be able to for people with physical disabilities, we have to be able to control the buttons, for people who are blind it may be much more efficient to not display what is on the screen, but to display what the choices are. For example, let's say what's on the screen is they have models with whatever it is going by the screen and when you see what you want you press the button and you order it. But why if there is 10 things go by don't you just send a list of 10 things out and the person would say I want the tenth item and it would go back in and then to have to send out some description of what's on the screen so the person can send some description of where you ought to press on the screen in order to X out. So I don't know, in other words there may be some, what are my choices this is my choice which is independent of the display on the screen which may be done in some really esoteric visual attractive fashion.

We talked about the need for locating the talking sign kind of a function.

Question: For physical disabilities any kind of text. For example, modem or fax machines, printers or so on.

Gregg: So people with physical disabilities any ability to transfer information that would normally be entered on a keypad.

Question: Or control the computer or direct access to the printer.

Question: I see text control specially for the wheelchair users being able to use their laptops and transfer to a printer without having to go to a hard connect.

Gregg: Also, it might be useful to use a display because it maybe that it is easier for you to use a remote display than it is to try to get up to see the display. Hearing impairment, is there a role for ID?

Question: Technology for a lecturer and cordless mick. The mainstream frequencies that we wouldn't want to be interfering with that.

Gregg: Usually if you have a person with a hearing impairment, which you would call captions that would be built-in, there is no reason you would need.

Question: More of a lecturer situation where you have a lecturer talking and convey across to the person's local hearing aid.

Gregg: Are we being too closed minded because we keep thinking of an ATM kiosk. People are using these for all of these things are these going to be a way that you know. Again, you can use it for everything that everybody else would use it for. File transfer and stuff like that.

Question: Multi-media, then the people would have security problems. We would definitely going to need some. If there is actually information.

Gregg: Transmission of closed captions it maybe that for some individuals they would rather have the captions be on a separate device than blocking part of the picture on the screen if they have something with them. If they don't, then obviously you would put them up on the screen. I heard a lot of people talking about the nice thing about showing a closed caption movie on a computer is you can use it on a higher resolution monitor and cause the caption to be displayed under the picture rather than over the picture. That is usually nice. An HD TV, high definition TV. You know, things to get the captions from blocking the windows.

Neil: I think one of the things we will have to try to come to some consensus in the group is how much of the return channel should we be trying to get to get adequate information for blind persons. What is the considerations in making your what we would be calling the TAC, the total access cord, sufficiently cheap that it gets included in the equipment or left lying around. So it is one end of your infrared channel is that you can't afford to put very much processing in there to extract the information from the video the stuff you are sending back. So the more processing you put at the host end, the less band width you need to get the stuff back, but the more costly.

Obviously, the higher the band width you have available the less processing you need.

Question: You use this kind of approach on very simple displays. The driver having the bit stream going through an LED. You have to do that really with just no processing and just really require the basic raw information that goes through an LED. That might be the approach to take on most kind of data systems that are cheap already and have to be able to stay cheap. A more complex thing like a kiosk you might be able to get away with putting more load on the kiosk.

Question: Be able to teach clients from infrared transmissions and if we are encouraging or promoting those.

Gregg: One other thought that struck me that might be helpful I think we should probably put up on the network is the collection of scenarios. Such as, Mary has this disability and approaches the kiosk and has this with them and the link will allow them to do X. That kind of a thing you just put them all up and that will give all of us a sort of a nice simple way of thinking of all of the dimensions of what we need to do and everybody else could say, what if the person had this other think wouldn't that change what it needed to do. Okay, good so we would stick another scenario. It might be an easier way to get a gut feeling and an orientation to it. It needs to be able to handle.

Neil: This scenario is also for non-disabled people. What are the benefits for non-disabled people. One of the things that I put in when I was doing scenario for one of these for someone on this subject was reducing the likelihood of being mugged at an ATM machine 2 miles from where my bank was and a guy got shot at the ATM machine I usually use at 8:00 in the evening. Things people relate to in LA. Okay, if I decrease the time I am standing in front of the ATM machine, decreasing the amount of time that I am likely to be snuck up on. So the scenarios should include ways that trigger reactions in the people who are reading it.

Gregg: And you will be recharging a smart card, you in fact don't have to actually touch the ATM in order to withdraw money from it.

John: One approach in Europe was concerning smart housing for disabled people. They had infrared controllers to control anything central heating, dishwasher, television and they had different ones designed for different disabilities. You can customize the controller.

Gregg: Smart homes is another thing we need to look at for infrared.

John: I will give you the e-mail and contact there.

Neil: There is another here in the States a magazine I subscribe to called Circuit Cellar Inc. Which is Steve, who use to write the interesting article for Byte from way back. They are pushing very hard for the remote control home. A lot of the resources for this stuff happening in the States is coming through that channel and there is a lot of infrared stuff. It is another source of practical functioning technology that is there. What they have come up with.

Gregg: Mark has you noted that we are about 1/2 hour over. Does anybody have any other things that we really should hit upon. Otherwise, we look forward to seeing you on the list serve. Also, we will have it up on the gopher, WWW, FTP. You come into any of the three doors and you will find the information. We will start setting trees up and we will put fruit on it as the fruit comes in.

Gregg: At RESNA we will have another meeting for those of you who will be there to sit and put our heads together. And someplace along you will probably put together a technical group which may be all of us or some of us. Start hammering out some of the technical issues.

-------Attendees---------

Gregg Vanderheiden, Trace R&D Center
Mark Novak, Trace R&D Center
Kim Henry, Sentient Systems Technology, Inc.
Gary Kiliany, Sentient Systems Technology, Inc.
Dan Weirich, GW Micro
Neil Scott, CSLI Stanford
Chris Serflek, ATRC, U of Toronto
Ben Rockwell
Concepcion Gomez del Prado
Francisco Gomez, Hospital Ramon Cajal
M. David Minnigerode, Computer Science, Texas A&M Univ.
Paul Schroeder, American Foundation for the Blind
Neal Ewers, Trace R&D Center
Maureen Kaine-Krolak, Trace R&D Center
Barry Romich, Prentke Romich Co.
Mike Walter, Prentke Romich Co.
Ron Frantz, Prentke Romich Co.
Dave Hershberger, Prentke Romich Co.
Cliff Kushler, Prentke Romich Co.
Bart Bauwens, Dept. of Electrotechnick, Kalh Univ.
John Gill, Royal National Institute for the Blind
John Brabyn, Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute
Marie Davis, Sound Advice Systems, Inc.
Alan Cantor, Workplace Accommodation Consultant

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