Categories | Disabilities: Auditory | Interfaces: Visual | Communication: Telephone | Communication: Face-to-face |
Description - Develop a communication system that visually shows speech in some form to people who are deaf without relying on a full-blown and often faulty speech recognition system. One idea would be to break the speech into phonemes which could the be watched and assembled into words by the user.
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: Auditory | Interfaces: Visual |
Description - A system to help people who are deaf become aware of sounds around them while they are using a computer could be interesting. Perhaps a prototype could "decorates" the frame of the active window with a display giving information about environmental sounds. Or, perhaps the display is attached to the edge of the screen. Using a pair of microphones (stereo sound in) you could likely even indicate the direction to the sound.
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 | Disabilities: Visual | Interfaces: Visual |
Description - Portable readers and GPS based orientation products.
Submitted by Gary Bishop
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 | 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