| tags: blind, web, ideas, enabling technology, motor impaired, autism
I'd like to make a web application that will enable teachers to create simple "books" with hot spots on each page. The hot spots might play a sound or do some other action like changing to another page. Really simple stuff.
| tags: blind, motor impaired, ideas, links, enabling technology
Seems to me this service has great potential for kids with learning disabilities. Might enable a sort of skimming for blind people as well.
| 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 .