| 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: recipes
These pancakes are light and delicious.
| tags: programming, links
I got a report that
Tar Heel Reader
wasn't speaking on some newer computers. Thankfully it also didn't work on my Vista VM. I painfully tracked down the problem to the
Content-Disposition: attachment
header I had added to make debugging easier. After figuring out the problem I found this
Adobe info describing the change
.
| tags: random
/afs/isis/depts/compsci/research/assist/
| tags: programming
I needed to get pyibmtts working for the new Tar Heel Reader installation over at ibiblio.org. I couldn't install ibmtts in the usual /opt place over there because I don't have root access (and only I'm authorized to use it anyway). To make it work, I installed ibmtts in $HOME/opt and $HOME/var. And I hacked the paths in $HOME/var/IBM/ibmtts/cfg/eci.ini to point to the libraries. I modified Pete's setup.py for pyibmtts to add $HOME to the search paths and one tricky bit. To help it find the shared libraries that are part of ibmtts I set the LD_RUN_PATH environment variable to point to the ibmtts lib folder. I understand from this page that setting this environment variable at compile time causes the search path to be encoded into the shared library.
| tags: random
I've thought about this several times (that's how geeky I am, when I can't work, I think about things like this). Thinking about it the other day, I suddenly hit on a simple approximation made possible by the current prices.
| tags: windows, mac, programming, enabling technology, ubuntu
Outfox is a Firefox extension that allows in-page JavaScript to access local platform services and devices such as text-to-speech synthesis, sound playback and game controllers. You can read all about it at its Google Code page and discuss it in its Google Group .
| tags: random
I really ought to use source code control. I know it. But my laziness combined with my poor memory, makes it hard.
| 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 .