Categories | Social impact: Education | Disabilities: Medical | Disabilities: Cognitive | Disabilities: Physical | Disabilities: Auditory | Disabilities: Visual |
Description - Some forms of entertainment, video games for instance, cannot be accessed by persons with disabilities. Build a video game that can be enjoyed by anyone. A game that can be used in an educational setting for young children would be excellent. Multiplayer games would be interesting, especially ones that involve cooperation among kids with different abilities.
Categories | Information visualization: Text | Interfaces: Auditory | Disabilities: Visual |
Description - The defacto standard in screen reader software, JAWS, costs over $800. JAWS sticks very closely to the stacked windows metaphor used by all modern visual window systems. Unfortunately stacking is not an audio concept. If two people are standing one behind the other, you can still hear them both; but in JAWS only the front most application gets to speak. What is worse, when a pop-up window appears it takes over the speech. We have noticed that the ideas of stacking and obscuration don't make much sense to some blind users. What would be an appropriate audio metaphor for the desktop? Perhaps the various applications could be represented as different individuals who have gathered in a semi-circle in front of the user. Using spatial sound each application could appear to speak from a different location. The user could choose to direct his comments or commands to any of the applications by directing his gaze toward it. This could make a neat paper or even a thesis topic.
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Disabilities: Auditory | Disabilities: Physical | Disabilities: Cognitive | Disabilities: Medical | Interfaces: Auditory | Interfaces: Visual | Interfaces: Tactile |
Description - 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.
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory | Information visualization: Maps and diagrams | Information visualization: Rendering |
Description - How can recording-based audio be related to image-based rendering? Is there a way to synthesize virtual sound environments based on recorded audio? How can sound environments be made more realistic? Applying this idea to a UNC campus map would be interesting. GB has built a system for recording audio with an array of 8 microphones arranged in a circle. Can we make realistic sound scapes of points around campus using the array?
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory | Information visualization: Maps and diagrams | Information visualization: Rendering | Social impact: Education |
Description - Is it possible (or even worthwhile) to make realistic sounds for audio simulations like a street-crossing game? How much does realistic audio improve such simulations over using synthetic sound effects? Research in this area would be beneficial to other projects that make use of audio environments for education.
Categories | Social impact: Education | Disabilities: Visual |
Description - Create a free typing tutor for children who are blind. In a school near here, a blind 4th grader did NOTHING every week while his peers took keyboarding lessons because his school didn't buy speech software for one of the computers in the keyboarding class. We could fix this! Make it fun and educational at the same time. Design it so that it is accessible by children both with and without sight. Getting it to run on multiple platforms would be excellent.
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory | Interfaces: Tactile | Information visualization: Maps and diagrams | Information visualization: Rendering |
Description - What does it mean to 'zoom in' without sight? Can users without vision effectively zoom in and out of parts of images, maps, and diagrams to get more and less information? Research methods for using the numeric keypad with its directional layout to zoom into and out of certain regions on the screen. Try to develop an interface that allows navigation both in and out of the screen. Such a development would be very useful in displaying maps to the blind.
Categories | Social impact: Education | Social impact: Acceptance | Disabilities: Visual |
Description - What kinds of models do people who have always been blind have for space, scale, projection, etc.? How might computer aids or specific lessons address changing that model? Research this topic and report on your findings. Develop a prototype if appropriate.
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Information visualization: Text | Social impact: Acceptance |
Description - People often notice mistakes in their writing when they look at a word and notice it is 'not quite right.' What if you cannot see the word spelled out? How can you know a word is spelled incorrectly when a screen reader speaks things phonetically? For instance, 'nock' and 'knock' are pronounced the same by JAWS, but mean totally different things. In most cases, the first is most likely a spelling mistake. Research and build a spell checker that parses text based on phonetic spellings and indicates when a word might be spelled incorrectly.
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory | Interfaces: Tactile | Interfaces: Devices |
Description - In most NC public schools the kids go to computer lab at least once per week. The sighted kids use interactive story books (click on the picture something interesting happens), ordinary games, and math tutor programs. The blind kids have NOTHING to do! Using commodity PC (or Apple) hardware, spatial sound, and force-feedback (haptic) devices like the Microsoft Force-feedback Joystick, make a game that is first fun, then maybe educational. Check out http://drive.soundsupport.net/ for an example of a driving game for blind people. "Adventure" (http://www.adventurecollective.com/index.shtml) might be an interesting game to adapt. Multi-player games could be really cool. What would "The Sims" be like for blind people? How about "Pac Man" or "Break Out"? There a lots of possibilities here for games addressing different age groups and objectives.
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Tactile | Interfaces: Auditory | Social impact: Education |
Description - Kids who are blind often have poor muscle tone because they don't move around much. The idea of this project is to get kids to move AND to teach them something at the same time. So called "DDR Mats" such as the RedOctane Dance Pad http://redoctane.com/exreddanpad.html are intended for playing the game "Dance Dance Revolution" with the PlayStation or XBox. With an adapter these mats can be connected to the USB port on a PC. I think we could make a neat game something like Twister that is fun for kids and teaches Braille. The idea is for the child to use their hands, feet, head, or whatever to press the appropriate dots (up to 6) for a Braille character.
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory | Interfaces: Tactile | Interfaces: Devices | Information visualization: Maps and diagrams | Social impact: Education |
Description - BATS is a project at UNC that uses audio and tactile feedback to convey map information to blind users. It focuses on helping students with visual impairments.
Submitted by Peter Parente
Categories | Disabilities: Visual |
Description - This site contains all kinds of information about visual impairment. There is a description of the human eye, information about medical conditions which cause blindness, and statistics. Did you know that 45% of those with severe visual impairment or blindness have a high school diploma (compared to 80% of fully sighted people)? There is also a technology link including information on assistive technology and electronic books. The site contains message boards, a bookstore, and links to several journals.
Submitted by Kelly Van Busum
Categories | Disabilities: Visual |
Description - The Sensory Access Foundation (SAF) tries to help people with visual impairments find jobs. Two parts of this site are particularly interesting: the list of blind etiquette and the success stories. The blind etiquette page answers common questions about how to interact with people who are blind and their guide dogs. The success stories include some descriptions of the technology people with visual impairments use to do their jobs.
Submitted by Kelly Van Busum
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Communication: Internet |
Description - This brief article gives a nice introduction to the various issues surrounding accessibility of websites to the visually impaired. While the suggestions offered by this article are limited in scope, it is a decent starting point for exploring the challenges of designing sites that are easily browsable for all users.
Submitted by Greg Lanier
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Disabilities: Auditory | Disabilities: Physical | Disabilities: Cognitive | Disabilities: Medical |
Description - This website is a list of assistive technology companies. Each listing includes the main products of the company and contact information. I think this website may be helpful for students researching present technology regarding their project interests.
Submitted by Christa Wheeler
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory |
Description - Nice collection of papers from a conference
Submitted by Gary Bishop
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Information visualization: Text |
Description - A free text-to-speech screen reader that supports the AT&T Natural Voices. It can also speak text to MP3 files.
Submitted by Peter Parente
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Information visualization: Maps and diagrams | Interfaces: Tactile | Interfaces: Devices |
Description - News article about a tactile display for computer images developed by NIST.
Submitted by Fred Brooks
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Disabilities: Auditory | Disabilities: Physical | Disabilities: Cognitive | Disabilities: Medical | Social impact: Acceptance | Social impact: Legal issues |
Description - Online book about accessibility.
Submitted by Fred Brooks
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory |
Description - vOICe is software that converts a visual image into a sound image. A vertical line scans left to right, representing brighter-intensity pixels as louder sounds and vertically-higher pixels as higher-pitched sounds. A blind person can wear a HMD consisting of a video camera + vOICe. The website has a *cool* Java applet that demos the software, allowing you to try the site's GIFs and your own images. Try drawing a grid.
Submitted by Suzanne Vogel
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Visual |
Description - Portable readers and GPS based orientation products.
Submitted by Gary Bishop
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory | Information visualization: Maps and diagrams |
Description - Map products for people with visual impairments.
Submitted by Gary Bishop
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory | Communication: Internet | Information visualization: Text |
Description - Spoken language access to lists of information.
Submitted by Gary Bishop
Categories | Disabilities: Visual |
Description - Huge collection of links, files, and programs for people who are blind.
Submitted by Gary Bishop
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory |
Description - A free webpage reader for Windows.
Submitted by Peter Parente
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory | Interfaces: Tactile | Interfaces: Devices | Information visualization: Text | Information visualization: Maps and diagrams | Information visualization: Rendering |
Description - This site has lots of information about orientation and mobility. Among other things, there is an entire book on teaching orientation and mobility to kids and a "living" book in progress about assistive technologies for wayfinding.
Submitted by Andrew Raij
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Tactile |
Description - Software that allows a user to feel the pixels on the screen.
Submitted by Peter Parente
Categories | Disabilities: Visual |
Description - A website hosting a number of simple, accessible games.
Submitted by Gary Bishop
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Auditory | Interfaces: Tactile | Interfaces: Devices | Communication: Telephone |
Description - A combination PDA/Phone that uses braille and speech output. No visual display at all.
Submitted by Andrew Raij
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Disabilities: Physical |
Description - This is the site about a guide dog school in North Carolina. There is information about obtaining a guide dog, what guide dogs know when they graduate, and sponsorship. There is also interesting information about what makes a good guide dog.
Submitted by Kelly Van Busum
Categories | Disabilities: Visual | Disabilities: Auditory | Disabilities: Physical | Disabilities: Cognitive | Interfaces: Visual |
Description - Provides suggestions and descriptions of various ailments. Organized by disability, user group, and technology.
Submitted by Sean Hanlon
Categories | Disabilities: Visual |
Description - Allows users to view webpages and images as seen by a person who has one of three different types of color blindness: deuteranope, protanope, tritanope.
Submitted by Sean Hanlon