We’re very pleased to present a project we’ve been working on for some time at the Staunton Media Lab. We call it The Google Translate Trick. These are instructions for using Google Translate to read any printed document. For the blind and visually impaired, this technique has the potential to make life a little easier by reading things to you such as street signs, menus, legal documents, written instructions, books, magazines, newspapers, and almost any other printed document—in up to 90 different languages! Wow! That’s life-changing.

The Google Translate Trick is a crude scanner-to-voice system that is very close to being a great piece of assistive technology. With a couple tweaks, it could open up entire libraries to the blind without the need for embossing into Braille or producing talking books. Right now, it can be an incredible facilitator for the visually impaired who have enough sight to position the camera. They can use it to have legal documents or other important information—such as prescription labels or doctor’s instructions—read to them by their phones.

We have been trying to work out the bugs in this presentation, but there are just too many issues to deal with. We feel it is important to present the information we have and then continuously improve it. Below is a 2-minute video of the technique, followed by step-by-step instructions, and then an edited, audio-only version of the instructions. We sincerely welcome your feedback in the comments section about your experiences attempting The Google Translate Trick and your suggestions for improving our instructions. Thank You!

The Staunton Media Lab is pleased to offer another piece of copyright-free, ambient audio for your use and enjoyment.

This is a sensational seven-minutes of near silence. It’s meant to run in the background of a video or slideshow or just on your computer while you’re working away. SML audio engineer Coley Evans has kept the sound very soft; you’ll have to turn it up to hear the intriguing tones of the Sansula.

What is a Sansula? A Sansula is a type of thumb piano designed for music therapy. It plays a modal series of tones that are soothing by themselves and also pleasing in any combination. The tines of the thumb piano are pressed down with the thumb to generate the tone.

This is the second offering from the Staunton Media Lab. This week, we’re serving up 10 Minutes of Audio Bliss! This is an ambient soundscape recorded deep in the Taxter Ridge Park Preserve in Westchester County, New York.

Go ahead, start the audio while you read this post. It features water running over rocks in a stream along with bird calls and a little breeze. It’s very peaceful and can help calm you. Put it on in the background and relax!

This is the first official announcement of something we’re calling the Staunton Media Lab. We begin with our first podcast, a series of sound checks cooked down to a 3-minute audio file.

Have you ever wondered, “Would I sound better if I used a webcam?” The answer is, “Yes!” That’s the surprising result of our side-by-side comparison of 10 different microphone/recording combinations. Listen to the embedded audio and use the comments below to tell us which sounds best to you—and why.

The Staunton Media Lab is an attempt to build a vocational training program for people who are hearing-impaired, visually-impaired, or cognitively-impaired teaching the skills of editing audio and video files. Today’s audio file was assembled from more than a dozen recordings by audio engineer Coley Evans, who has been blind since birth. For those in our audience who are hearing impaired, we provide the following guide to the audio file.