Entries Tagged Blind

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.
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A US federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that the country’s one-sized paper money discriminates against the blind and told the government to change the currency’s size and texture. It’s taken six years to get this far, and the government may well appeal again. I say give it up and switch to an accessible design.

Maze Day is for visually impaired and blind students in grades K-12, their parents and teachers. Your students will enjoy fun and educational computer applications developed especially for them. UNC students will learn how well their accessible applications work with real users. And everyone will have a good time!

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Excellent post from Pete on real the benefits of spatial audio in the user interface.

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.

Karen says:

I just got back from 3.5 days at a camp with 15 adolescents with significant disabilities. Most use AAC devices and some sort of alternate computer input. One teenage girl explained to me that she is pretty good in math but she has two problems as she tries to tackle high school math.

1. She needs on onscreen calculator that is scanning accessible and allows her to send the answer from the window on the calculator to the document she has open on her computer. For the most part, her documents are actually scanned omni-page or pdf files - she steps through answer fields using a tab key. Right now, the only option is to copy, minimize, activate the form, and paste - that is really hard for her.

2. She needs some sort of math program that allows her to show her work. There is a program called Math Pad that kind of lets you do this, but it stops at simple multiplications and division.

Also, I’ve had teachers of the visually impaired ask me for calculators that would enable kids to show their work.

TTSynth.com is offering IBM’s speech technology for Linux for $40. This is like the speech engine used in JAWS.

From engadget. I read about this display technology years ago. I’m glad to hear it is nearing commercialization.

Flexible keyboards like this, this and this are super cheap and readily available. I wonder if we could use them to make an alternative keyboard for people with physical, visual, or cognitive disabilities?

I’m thinking we could turn the keyboard over (keys down) and glue it to a thin board. I’m guessing the back of these things is pretty smooth. You’d put your tactile or visual overlay over the back of the keyboard. Now when the user presses, multiple keys will likely be activated. But we can handle that with a special keyboard layout as described here for Windows. I’m pretty sure there are comparable capabilities for Macs and Linux.

We could even define some sort of simple overlay maker that makes it simple to define and use specialized layouts. I’m guessing we could only support relatively large regions with this simple cheap approach.

Here’s an idea for a simple game to encourage movement to music. I’m drawing from our Comp 80 class ideas for Generalized DDR.

In this game the player moves to music. Their score depends on how well their movement is synchronized with the music and on how many different moves they made. A more advanced version allows them to play along with the music though various delays will have to be overcome to enable their sounds to be sync’ed with the music. The system keeps track of their score and rewards improvement. Perhaps new tunes get unlocked like in DDR.

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