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Blind Persons have to learn many things by heart, such as: phone numbers, addresses, their appointments, etc. A computer gives multiple possibilities to a blind user: they can store their contacts in the address book, use a reminder or many similar devices. It makes their lives easier. Blind musicians can use the same tools on their computers as the sighted musicians, etc. In short, the computers give to its blind users more possibilities to gain equal opportunities in communication or in finding a job.

On the other hand, everything has it's price. There are not many blind persons able to become skilled computer users. It is very difficult to use a computer without using a mouse. You have to remember many complicated shortcuts: alt keys, ctrl-insert-tab-F1. These shortcuts cannot even be easily remembered by a sighted person. Visually disabled people have no choice: they have to access the computer either by using shortcut keys or not use it at all.

Another big obstacle is: "How could a blind person know what is going on the screen?"
There are two ways of approach:

1. - Everything that comes up on the screen is at the same time displayed on "the display for the blind" so-called Braille line. It is a display which shows a text line in Braille that can be read "touched" by a blind person. The problem is that this device costs about 40000 kn which is not acceptable for the majority of visually disabled population in our country.

2. - Everything that comes up on the screen is being outspoken (played back). That means that the program speaks everything what is appearing on the screen. When it comes to pronunciation, Croatian language presents a big problem. English language pronunciation is satisfying, whereas Croatian speech synthesizer is far from being created. So if you want a text, written for instance in Word, to be pronounced in Croatian, you should have an external speech synthesizer that costs 80000 kn It is still too much. Furthermore, artificial speech produced by this speech synthesizer does not sound as a human voice which makes it very difficult to understand. So could you imagine an American speech synthesizer reading a Croatian text - a disaster. Impossible to use!

The computers can help to visually disabled persons to overcome a part of their handicap although this requires big financial and personal sacrifice (the time and patience needed to learn all the complicated computer commands). In Croatia there are about 5500 visually disabled persons. Among them only 50 persons could be considered as active computer users. This is to little, but the number of users could increase even ten times if we manage to resolve three main problems:

- The financial problem (The software for the blind should be free and not one of the most expensive products).
- The problem of inaccessibility (Nowadays, the users can access the computer using more simple products).
- Non existence of a Croatian speech software (We have good conditions to create a Croatian speech software of high quality and it should be free for the blind computer users).