Today at about noon we passed 1,000,000 books read on Tar Heel Reader . I've embedded a video below showing how its use has spread over the 22 months since we began back in May 2008. If you have sound you should be able to hear a varying pitch indicating how many books were read each day. Listen for the pitch to go down during the summer and at Christmas.

We've got books in 12 languages on the site and they have been read in 133 countries. Our server has been accessed over 70.8 million times and has pushed about 1.1 terabytes of data onto the web.

more...

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...

I've been thinking about the trade off between difficulty and choice (or freedom) in making music. I cooked up this simple graph to illustrate the idea.

more...

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?

more...

The iPhone and iPod Touch are very interesting platforms for enabling technology. Touch, accelerometers, portability, radio, coolness; they've got it all.

more...

I'm thinking of things we can do with the nearly ready Wiimote (and Balance Board) capability in our Outfox extension. We can use the accelerometers, IR camera, buttons, and rumble. I'm going to list game/activity ideas so I can recruit some help.

more...

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.

more...

Karen suggests it might be useful to develop VR scenarios to help kids become accustomed to normally stressful audio over stimulation without the added social burden of having to deal with people at the same time. For example, many kids can't go to the movie theater because the THX sound thing at the beginning overwhelms them. If they could experience that THX sound in a controlled environment with gradually increasing volume it might not be so bad when it happened at the theater.

more...

Another neat idea from Karen. There have been some news stories about a DVD that helps kids with autism learn to read faces and emotions . It would be cool to do a version which allows folks to upload their own pictures and which presents the faces in an interactive web site.

more...

Karen says many kids in wheelchairs never get to experience typical theme park rides. What can we do about that?

more...