Posts with tag: motor impaired


Karen notes

| 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.

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SerialKeys for OS X

| tags: motor impaired, enabling technology

This software is no long supported. Anyone is free to attempt to make it work with the new versions of OS/X.

SerialKeysX is an implementation of the SerialKeys protocol for Apple's OS X operating system . It allows control of the computer's keyboard and mouse over a serial connection from devices such as the EyeGaze and other augmented communication devices . You may download and use the software for free.

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CamKeys is a simple camera-based alternative keyboard

| tags: motor impaired, enabling technology

People with severely impaired movement often use one or two switches to control their computers and/or communication devices. Even though the switch is arguably the simplest electrical component, when it becomes an assistive technology it is likely to cost the end user hundred's of dollars. On the other hand, a fantastically complex electronic device, the USB camera, is available at discount stores for a few dollars. CamKeys is a simple python program that makes a cheap camera emulate any number of switches. It simply generates key events when user-specified regions of the camera image change.

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