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?
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Can We Find It? Yes We Can!
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Maze Day is for visually impaired and blind students in grades K-12, their parents and teachers. Your students will enjoy fun and educational computer applications developed especially for them. UNC students will learn how well their accessible applications work with real users. And everyone will have a good time!
We plan to have a wide variety of accessible fun, educational, and exercise activities including:
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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
.
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A US federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that the country's one-sized paper money discriminates against the blind and told the government to change the currency's size and texture.
It's taken six years to get this far, and the government may well appeal again. I say give it up and switch to an accessible design.
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Maze Day is for visually impaired and blind students in grades K-12, their parents and teachers. Your students will enjoy fun and educational computer applications developed especially for them. UNC students will learn how well their accessible applications work with real users. And everyone will have a good time!
more...
Excellent
post
from Pete on real the benefits of spatial audio in the user interface.
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Alex sent a pointer to
www.helpyouplay.com
has some cool game ideas including an
accessible version of Guitar Hero
similar to
our project last semester
. I'm glad to see more work on accessible games.
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Karen says:
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TTSynth.com
is offering IBM's speech technology for Linux for $40. This is like the speech engine used in JAWS.
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