| tags: motor impaired, enabling technology
My friend and source of ideas for interesting projects, Karen Erickson, suggested that kids love watching YouTube videos but they aren't readily accessible to switch users. Couldn't we make an accessible version, she asked?
| tags: motor impaired, enabling technology, literacy
I'm thinking about the client-side interface to our Big Words project with the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies. Rebecca is making good progress on the server-side logic for the games, the instructive feedback machinery that is the essence of this approach. But we need a good looking user interface to keep kids coming back.
| tags: motor impaired, ideas, enabling technology
Karen says many kids in wheelchairs never get to experience typical theme park rides. What can we do about that?
| tags: blind, enabling technology, motor impaired, ideas, literacy
Tricia from Texas wrote to say:
| tags: motor impaired, enabling technology, links, literacy
Paul posted a really nice video about using Tar Heel Reader over at YouTube. The puppet and the stop motion self assembly of the switch interface are great! Check out Reading with Franz .
| tags: blind, enabling technology, motor impaired, ideas, literacy
I saw iDaft today and think it rocks! You play the samples by typing the corresponding keys on your keyboard. Not surprising technically, its just Flash. But it makes me think about combining fun, music, and literacy. What could we do with music and samples like this to make fun and even educational games for kids with disabilities?
| tags: motor impaired, enabling technology, literacy
This is a follow up to my post about Accessible Math Ideas from over a year ago. I finally got a smart high school student, William Condon from the NC School of Science and Math, to implement word prediction with built-in math.
| tags: blind, motor impaired, random, programming, enabling technology
Atool is an extension to our previous CamKeys project. Like CamKeys, atool allows keyboard input based on a cheap webcam. Atool adds DDR pads (or other game controller buttons) as an additional input and it allows playing recorded sounds on input events. My teacher friends in the Progress Education Program over at Asheville wanted to experiment with alternative computer interfaces in their classrooms for kids with multiple disabilities. I demonstrated MusicPad (a simple DDR pad driven sound player) and CamKeys to them. They were excited by the possibilities but daunted by editing files to control it all and depending on keyboard focus to get events to the right places.
So I hacked on CamKeys to add a GUI for configuring all sorts of events. I'll include a few screen shots below. Now the teachers are recording their own speech and music sounds and hooking them to events on the DDR pad or camera.
The CamKeys roots of this project were funded by the Mozilla foundation.
The source is in CVS at sourceforge uncassist .
| tags: motor impaired, programming, enabling technology, literacy
Tar Heel Reader is a web site designed to help teachers make easy-to-read books for children with disabilities. It has a growing selection of books to read and a simple process for creating new books using pictures found on Flickr .
| tags: enabling technology, motor impaired, ideas, literacy
Notes from a conversation with Karen. Always great fun. Dec 10-13 Karen at a camp with a dozen or so AAC users in Umatilla, Fl. Kids work about 5 hours per day, rest of the time they need interesting activities. Teenagers. Similar interests to my class. What could my FYS seminar students do to help?
Ideas: Content for Route 66, maybe Nascar? Games that are switch accessible, maybe racing? Maybe some FYS students could go? How does that work? Coordinate with Software Engineering and maybe a parallel ET class for CS students.
Scratch for interactive content generation?
Karen has a group at Forest View elementary, kids are using computers to make content of various kinds. For example recording themselves reading books for 1st graders. They could be a good group to get interested in content for device users. Visuals + Audio and simple text could be exciting to author and use.
Look at A to Z phonics website, content isn't that good but reading level is appropriate, see what books should look like.
Check out Dirty Bertie
Take pictures from good book, get object name and descriptors from teacher and generate really simple sentences like "Butterflies can ______" or "Pirates are ______" to make lots of content quickly. Share on a web site. Make it easy to produce and share content. Patterns like "The noun is verbing" and "The adjective noun is verbing". Generate text for beginning level reader.
Choose a topic, add descriptors, and generate sentences. Makes a "PowerPoint" or whatever for the teacher to use. Pictures from Flickr or somewhere. Teacher provides topic, gets a bunch of pictures, provides descriptors, system fills words into sentence frames. Make adding pictures easy. Site provides text to speech converted to mp3 and embedded. How about sounds for blind kids?
Something like SamiSays for recording "homework" answers from AAC devices that don't interface to computers. Teacher/parent plugs device into line-in and computer records audio to send to teacher. Kid listens to questions and answers using their device, app sends mp3 to teacher with the results. Enables kid to do homework independently. Email access too. Use a VERY small number of words as controls for the computer by recognizing them in certain contexts. Provide independent computer access. email via mp3.