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
.
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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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Minh-Tri Pham wrote with info on his
PyCV package
. This could be very useful for locating kid's faces for games and therapy for kids who are motor impaired. His demo works fine on my Ubuntu system.
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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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Wow! Pete sent me this pointer to
Opengazer
. I've wondered if this was possible but never found a student to work on it. Thanks to
Piotr Zieliński
for developing it and making it open source. We'll have great fun with this in accessible applications for people with impaired movement.
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Gretchen sent a pointer to this
inspirational AAC video
.
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Greg pointed me to this article over at CNN about
Erik Ramsey and the work Phil Kennedy is doing with neural mapping
. Very interesting work. The article mentions The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominque Bauby; I've read that book and highly recommend it.
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Alex sent a pointer to
www.helpyouplay.com
has some cool game ideas including an
accessible version of Guitar Hero
similar to
our project last semester
. I'm glad to see more work on accessible games.
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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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