Victor Wong, a blind student at Cornell University, has developed software that turns colours into musical notes so that he can read weather maps.

“The images have three dimensions and I had to find a way of reading them myself,” Mr Wong explained.

The software assigns one of 88 piano notes to individually coloured pixels – ranging from blue at the lower end of this scale to red at the upper end. “As the notes increase in pitch I know the colour’s getting redder and redder, and in my mind’s eye a patch of red appears.”

The application is still very much in its infancy and is only useful for reading images that have been created digitally but Wong hopes that one day it can be developed to give blind people access to photographs and other images.

Via BBC News and Cornell News.