Entries Tagged Blind

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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Update: Maze Day 2008 will be April 30, 2008.

Maze Day has been postponed until Spring 2008. Many school districts are unable to come on December 6th so we’re going to postpone the activity until late Spring 2008 (around the time we’ve held it before). We apologize to those (few) of you who have already committed to coming.

Maze Day is for visually impaired students in grades K-12, parents and teachers to enjoy fun and educational computer applications. Lunch will be provided. Free!

Registration is limited to the first 70 students.

Date: December 6 POSTPONED
Time: 9am until 2pm
Location: Sitterson Hall on the UNC Chapel Hill campus (click here for directions)

Forms you will need:

Registration – Each group must register.

Photo Consent – We will only include your children in photographs of the event with your permission.

Experiment Consent – High school and middle school Maze day participants are invited to participate in a fun research study during Maze Day. This study is part of an activity called Metric Olympics where you will estimate the sizes of different things. Not only will you win prizes, but you will help researchers understand how students learn about size and estimation. Interested participants should read and sign the consent letter. Join us in having fun while helping out researchers

From eWeek.com:

A judge rules that the retailer needs to stand trial for having a Web site that is insufficiently accessible.

When a federal court judge issued rulings Oct. 2 that the $60 billion retailer Target needed to stand trial on charges that its Web site is not sufficiently accessible to visually-impaired shoppers, it sent a strong signal to much of the e-commerce space.

Firefox is the only browser I use, so when things don’t work, I get worried. We’re looking at Flash as a delivery vehicle for some of our applications for people with disabilities and ran into two potential show stoppers:

1. Flash doesn’t get focus unless you click on it with the mouse; many of our potential users don’t use mice!
2. Flash doesn’t allow access to right click; many switch interfaces generate left and right click events to signal the user pressing the mover or chooser switch.

I surfed around a bit expecting to find some quick solution and only found despair. It seems that lots of people have encountered these problems in various forms and haven’t found a solution.

I’ve found a very simple approach that works just fine for what we need; perhaps it will help someone else. The high bit is I’m using the Flash ExternalInterface object to allow JavaScript to catch keyboard and mouse events and then tell Flash about them. Flash never gets the focus and doesn’t need it.

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Diane asked, so I decided to process our server logs to find out how many times our game for children who are blind and visually impaired, Hark the Sound, has been downloaded and, if possible, the country that requested it.

The quick summary is that Hark the Sound has been downloaded by 1537 unique IP addresses, we have mailed 169 CDs to the US and 9 to other countries, and we have given away over 500 at workshops. We encourage people to make their own copies so we must be approaching 3000 installed versions in the field.

Identifying the geographic location associated with an IP address is a shaky proposition but I decided to try anyway. I used the database at Hostip.info to extract the following stats.

Hark has been downloaded by IP addresses in 70 countries and 46 US States. The countries I can identify include:

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Tom Elliott sent this link to an article in Directions Magazine on Emerging GIS Technology and Accessibility: Online Mapping for Everyone.