Welcome to the Spring Edition of our HumanWare client newsletter, “TechStyle”.

This is Issue 47 dated September 2005. In this edition, we feature news on the following:

DEATH OF Dr & Mrs RUSSELL SMITH

Staff of the HumanWare Group & leaders in the vision impaired field internationally, have been shocked by the news of the death of our founder & leader, Dr Russell Smith.

Russell & Marian were killed on Sunday, August 7th in the crash of their Cessna 182. 

They were avid fliers & while returning home together from Nelson, their aircraft crashed into the sea north of Christchurch.

Russell devoted his entire working life to developing innovative technology for people who are blind or visually impaired. In his 30 years of service, he became an icon & was recognized, honoured & admired internationally. His death is a huge loss & both he and Marian will be greatly missed by family, friends & colleagues all over the world.

Dr Russell Smith was one of the fathers of our industry. He has inspired and driven the development of an amazing list of technological firsts that have and will continue to create opportunities for people who are blind or visually impaired.

Russell's legacy will live long after the rest of us are gone!

Some of the "firsts" he has been responsible for developing are:

Sonic Guide (1976) - the world's first sonar-based electronic travel aid.

Mowat Sensor (1978) - the world's first hand-held electronic travel aid.

Viewscan (1980) - the world's first portable, high contrast, large print reading system
employing a hand-scan camera and a flat-panel display.

Viewscan Text System (1983) - the world's first portable, large print, word processing system.

Keynote (1986) - the world's first portable, talking word processor.

Viewpoint VGA (1989) - the first video magnifier to support a split screen computer connection
with an industry standard computer display.

SmartView (1995) - the world's first video magnifier to introduce built-in date, time, and
calculator functions.

SmartView Xtra (1999) - the first video magnifiers to achieve "plug and play" capability with a wide range of PC display formats.

BrailleNote (2000) - the world's first true Braille PDA.

myReader (2004) - the world's first low vision auto-reader.

At a packed memorial service held on Monday 15th August, closed circuit TV’s had to be set up to broadcast the service to the hundreds of people who could not be seated in the chapel.

 The following tribute is just one of the many hundreds received:

“If the value of a person’s life is best measured by the extent to which they enrich the lives of others, then Dr Smith thoroughly deserves the respect that was accorded him during the last week.
It has been well documented that Russell enhanced the lives of tens of thousands of blind and visually impaired people around the world, with specialist products that helped them to live and work independently.

Well known for working 70-80 hour weeks, for his dedication to staff, his managerial and technical abilities - he was still a very humble man.

Dr Russell Smith should rightly be remembered for his remarkable achievements, founding a company that grew to achieve annual turnover of about $70 million, with exports to more than 30 countries.

But many will most fondly remember Russell & Marian for their loving & humble natures.
This month we not only lost a visionary hi-tech industry leader - we also lost two very special people.

HUMANWARE GROUP – News Update

The Board of Directors at HumanWare has announced interim plans for the management of the HumanWare Group.

Gilles Pepin, who was president of VisuAide at the time of the merger with Pulse Data International, and who is now President of HumanWare Canada, has been appointed Acting Chief Executive Officer. This appointment is expected to last up to 6 months, during which time the Board, working with a specialist executive recruitment agency, aims to appoint a new CEO.

Gilles, an existing member of the group Board, will continue to be based in Montreal, Canada, but will regularly travel to New Zealand to work with senior management. Gilles has a very strong engineering & commercial background, with extensive experience in digital speech analysis, telecommunications & digital telephony. He has worked very closely with blindness organisations throughout the world, and for several years was a member of the technology committee of the World Blind Union.

The Chairman of HumanWare, Tim Robinson, said “Russell’s death is a great loss to our company, but Russell built a very strong management team & we have great confidence that Gilles will provide the leadership necessary to achieve further success and growth for HumanWare.”

“The next 12 months is expected to be a very exciting time for the company,” said Tim Robinson, “with a number of new products being released into the market, new strategic partnerships taking effect, and our move to new, purpose designed, premises in Christchurch at the end of August.”

Gilles Pepin said, “Every member of our company, worldwide, is determined to carry on Russell’s great work, & make him proud of us. HumanWare is an amazing company with a wealth of very talented staff, & we will continue to be the most successful & most innovative company in our industry.”

myReader SETS THE PACE.

This will change the way you look at Low Vision forever.

myReader is the world's first low vision  auto-reader.
Designed to benefit people suffering from eye conditions such as macular degeneration,  diabetic retinopathy, cataracts and glaucoma, myReader promises to revolutionise the low vision market forever. 

Unlike its predecessors, myReader scans & captures the entire page & then presents it to users, just the way they want to read. myReader enables those with low vision to go beyond just reading bills & writing shopping lists, and to once again read their favourite books with ease.

With one touch of a button myReader captures an image of whatever is on the viewing table and rearranges it to fit on the screen according to your preferences. When reading with myReader you only have to scroll in one direction - no longer are you required to move back and forth trying to find the last line you were reading.
 
Once text is captured it can be presented according to your specific preference.  Choose text to be presented as a neatly wrapped paragraph (column layout), as a continuous line (row layout) or one word at a time (word layout).

mPower EXCITEMENT.

HumanWare has announced the release of BrailleNote mPower, the next generation BrailleNote.

mPower is already exciting people with it’s stylish new looks & state of the art technology:

• USB connectivity, both client and master, allowing the use of peripherals such as printers, embossers, CD ROM drives, floppy drives and flash memory.

• Integrated Bluetooth, also including support for printing. This will allow customers to connect to a range of devices wirelessly, including keyboards, mobile phones, and other computers.

• A huge upgrade in on-board storage - from 16 MB to 128 MB.

• A general improvement in performance thanks to a significantly faster Intel X-Scale processor. Loading of large documents, surfing the web, clearing e-mail and other data-related tasks are incredibly faster.

• Media files may be played in high quality stereo, and multiple simultaneous audio sources are supported. This allows the user to listen to music while they perform other tasks on the BrailleNote. The Media Player also supports play lists.

• BrailleNote mPower will record audio, both through a built-in microphone & through an external microphone, in the industry standard wave format. A hotkey allows you to hear the last memo you recorded from anywhere in KeySoft.

• Streaming audio is supported for listening to Internet radio. This includes support for ACB Radio.

• Support for the Secure Digital (SD) cards. These tiny cards (about the size of a postage stamp) can add up to an extra gigabyte of onboard storage.

This new generation of BrailleNote gives us an exciting new hardware platform, on which many innovative upgrades will occur.

All this - & now available at only $9,250 for the 32 cell model & $6,350 for the 18 cell refreshable braille cell unit.

An outstanding audio presentation of the features & benefits of mPower BrailleNote has been prepared by our International Blindness Products Manager, Mr Jonathan Mosen. Similarly, we have a great Powerpoint presentation & we will be happy to email either (or both) to you. Please request your copy now by phone (02) 9686 2600, or email to: anthony.kirkpatrick@humanware.com

This is a completely new generation of product. However our current users can still stay on the cutting edge thanks to an innovative programme, which we will be implementing on October 1st.

Here's the deal.

The customer keeps their existing Braille display, (the most expensive single part of the device), and has that display transplanted into a brand new BrailleNote mPower.

It is not an upgrade.

Instead, customers are getting an entire new unit, the next generation of BrailleNote, by transplanting their Braille display into the new unit to save money.

Because there is no Braille display in a VoiceNote, the transplant programme is not available to owners of this unit.

The Braille display transplant service starts at a base price of $2,750 for KeySoft V6.1 customers. This increases to $2,980 for V5.x owners, $3,250 for V4.x owners, and $3,500 for V3.x customers.

There is also a special upgrade price of only $1,400 to anyone who purchased a BrailleNote or VoiceNote within three months of the release of BrailleNote mPower.

HUMANWARE – in review.

HumanWare came about by Pulse Data International and our friends at Canadian-based VisuAide, announcing the merger of their companies. This has created an exciting new organisation to serve the needs of people with impaired vision.

The HumanWare name has been widely used in the USA since it was adopted as the name for Pulse Data’s North American subsidiary in 1989. The name now defines a people-focused global company, dedicated to providing innovative, technology-based, solutions to enable vision impaired people to access information.

HumanWare is committed to retaining this focus on innovation and will maintain the existing R&D operations in both NZ and Canada. This combination will create the largest R&D capability in the industry.

With a total team of over 200 employees worldwide, we are one of the largest companies in the low vision and blindness industry. The parent company will still be based in Christchurch, New Zealand.

For those who don’t know the VisuAide name ….. VisuAide was founded in 1988 & is now recognised as the world leader in digital talking book reader technology with Victor Reader, our digital audio book solution for the print disabled. The company also manufactures Trekker, a GPS-based orientation and mobility product for the visually impaired and Maestro, the first accessible mainstream PDA.

MACULAR DEGENERATION FOUNDATION (MDF)

More exciting news for our Low Vision clients!
The MDF is a not for profit organization incorporated in Australia which receives most of it’s funding from industry. It does outstanding work, making Australians aware of the risks of macular degeneration & the latest techniques in coping with the problem.

HumanWare is now a sponsor of the Macular Degeneration Foundation.

Part of this sponsorship means that we will be touring the eastern states on a more regular basis, presenting our new product solutions to people suffering from this debilitating disease.

We look forward to seeing you at one of the many exhibitions where we will be presenting during this & the coming year.

ZOOMTEXT V9.0 Excitement

The following new features make this the most exciting & innovative screen magnifying programme ever:

• xFont – Advanced Text Magnification - you’ll see amazingly clear text at all magnification levels. All types and sizes of text, including italic and cursive fonts, are displayed with unmatched clarity.

• Extended Powers of Magnification - now magnifies from 1x to 36x & includes fractional powers of 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x & the new 2.5x

• Human Sounding Speech Synthesizers- The human quality of NeoSpeech now reads applications, documents, and web pages with voices that are clear and enjoyable to listen to.

• Application Settings - remembers how you like to work. Create unique ZoomText settings for each application that you use. Settings automatically change as you change applications.

• Reading Zones - let you instantly see and hear selected areas of your applications. For example, in a database you can create reading zones over the fields you view most often, and then with the press of a hotkey, have a selected field scrolled into view and/or spoken.

• Text Finder - instantly locate words or phrases in application or document window. Text Finder highlights and reads each found instance of the text. When the desired instance is found, you can begin reading from that location using ZoomText’s AppReader.

RAMONA GOES “Q”

For those travelling on Qantas flights in the next month or so, be sure to tune into channel 3 or 11 for the Peter Switzer compared “Talking Business” segment on the audio programme “Q Radio”.

Ramona is speaking on the Leadership programme & she does an outstanding job in championing the cause of employing vision impaired people. She talks about & demonstrates the use of BrailleNote & other technology to bridge the gap.

This will be heard on Qantas flights all around the globe & is a tribute to her ability to communicate with people from all walks of life.

MAX TV GLASSES - for TV Viewing

Maximize the size of TV screens with the easiest-to-fit, binocular, telescopic distance system ever introduced - MAXTV glasses!

These hands-free, head-mounted glasses provide 2.1x magnification & can be adjusted so that each eye lens can be focused separately.

The glasses will focus on objects from distances of 3 m [10 feet] to infinity, and are perfect for watching TV, sporting events, movies, theatre, bird watching, or any other distance viewing activity in which a magnified image would be helpful.

With flexible temples, the MAXTV telescopic glasses are the most comfortable television viewing device ever.

Features include:

• A bright, wide field of view (20º) and 2.1x magnification

• Individually focusable objective lenses to allow for adjustment of focal length from 10’ to infinity

• Eschenbach optics & flexible plastic temples - weighs only 49 grams

• Attractive, modern, hi-tech frame.

• Frosted objective lens housing eliminates distracting reflections

• Comfortable to wear, even for long periods of time

• Protective, zippered case and head-strap included at no charge!

Only $125 plus freight. Order now for immediate delivery!

KURZWEIL K1000 Version 10.

The very popular K1000 scanning, reading & learning software solution available from HumanWare, has just upgraded it’s offering from V9 to V10. Here is a glimpse of the many new features:

• Audio DAISY Document Creation
• Table Creation, Editing and Reading
• Improved Scanning and Recognition
• Expanded Online Search and Retrieval
• Updated High Quality Text to Speech from NeoSpeech
• Microsoft Word Conversion    

To find out details of this great new offering, call Ramona or Anthony.

These new features in K1000 V.10 expand upon the already extensive list of existing features, including colour scanning, flexible writing & editing tools, the ability to send files to email, Braille embosser compatibility, plus photocopier, fax & calculator applications.

TRADE IN OFFER

HumanWare are excited to announce a special offer to help our low vision clients upgrade to the latest technology.

If you have an old ViewPoint or SmartView CCTV (or even an old opposition brand) you could now benefit from our special Spring Trade-In offer on the purchase of a new SmartView video magnifier or myReader auto-reader.

Simply contact us on (02) 9686 2600 & tell us what equipment you are currently using & what you would like to trade up to.

NATIONAL VISION RESEARCH INSTITUTE (NVRI)

As HumanWare is always vitally interested in research & development & looking for new solutions to eye problems, we have been a long-time corporate sponsor of the NVRI. I thought you might like to know more about the activities of this excellent organization.

The National Vision Research Institute was established in 1972 on the initiative of Australian Optometrists.

The Victorian College of Optometry fosters the development of the Institute and has a strong interest in its continued growth and vitality. Infrastructure support has been provided by the Government of Victoria and by the Lions Vision Research Foundation, together with generous support from Members of the Institute. These members include Optometrists, Companies (like HumanWare) involved in the optical industry, and interested people in our community.

The Institute is dedicated to furthering the understanding of vision and its many disorders so that they might be prevented or treated more effectively. It is committed to exploring processes that underlie the disorders of vision & this requires its research to embrace comprehensive studies of the fundamental mechanisms of normal vision. Because the Institute devotes the whole of its resources to research, it is able to embark on investigations of difficult problems, which require intensive & coordinated research over a long period.

Over the years, Institute research programmes have encompassed a wide range of topics, ranging from clinical to basic. Their outcomes have included creation of the famous LogMAR chart for assessment of visual acuity, improved understanding of vision disorders such as amblyopia, cataract, presbyopia, retinal dystrophy and the exploration of the way visual stimuli are transmitted in the brain. The new research program aims to discover the way that colour, motion & form vision are segregated in the visual pathways.

AUSTRALIAN DISTRIBUTION

Thanks for joining us for this issue of HumanWare Australia’s  newsletter TechStyle.

We look forward to your company again for the Summer edition.