IAccessible2 new cross platform accessibility interface
| tags: enabling technology
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Check out OptiTrack at NaturalPoint
| tags: enabling technology
Searching for a speaker that you can feel vibrating
| tags: blind, ideas, enabling technology
I've made the claim that we can drive a small speaker at a low frequency and feel it vibrating.
An almost free Braille display
| tags: blind, ideas, enabling technology
For $25 we can buy a little USB device that has 6 audio outputs. They intend them as front/back, left/right, and center/bass; this is called 5.1 audio. They provide three standard 3.5mm headphone jacks for plugging in the speakers.
Making root beer and ginger ale
WikiHow has interesting recipes for root beer and ginger ale .
Graphs for blind students
| tags: blind, ideas, enabling technology
The most frequent request I get from teachers of the visually impaired is help with graphs. Graphs are a part of the curriculum that blind kids don’t get. I contend that simply displaying the graph with touch or sound is not the answer. What is? Could we (semi)automatically extract key points from a graph and convey that information to a student?
Cheap wheel-based Braille display
| tags: blind, ideas, enabling technology
Most refreshable Braille displays are constructed with pin-grid arrays like these:
The pins stick and the refreshable cells are expensive.Temporal computer interfaces
| tags: ideas, enabling technology
Computer interfaces are mostly sequential. Consider telephone menu systems: enter 1 for parts, enter 2 for service, etc. As another example, when you kill an unresponsive program, Windows XP pops up a dialog asking me if you want to send an error report to MS. You must respond to it before proceeding. An alternative user interface strategy (for both sighted and blind) depends on asynchronous alerts and user responses. Think of the underlining of misspelled words in many editors; it occurs sometime after typing and can be corrected (or not) anytime. Emacspeak has some nice features like this. The presence of a footnote associated with a word is indicated by a audible signal played along with the speech for the word without stopping. The listener can respond to the signal by requesting the footnote be followed or ignore it. A project investigating what is known about asynchronous user interfaces and perhaps a prototype implementation would be really interesting and likely result in a paper.
Switch accessible concept mapping
| tags: enabling technology, ideas, literacy
Concept mapping programs are important literacy tools used by many schools. They are currently inaccessible to people who are only able to use one or two switches for input.
Games for kids with cognitive impairments
| tags: ideas, enabling technology
Most video games are too hard for kids with cognitive difficulties. About the only approach currently available is to use things like “Game Genie” to “cheat”. We’d like an interesting and visually attractive computer game that emphasizes memory and has variable levels of difficulty. This will require an imaginative team willing to do some experimentation and willing to work with potential game players to get ideas. Of course, there are many kinds of impairment and one game will certainly not work for everyone. Our goal will be to make a game that is fun for one or two kids and see if it appeals to a larger audience.
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