Entries Tagged Blind

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.

I can reliably detect many simple targets and generate key events in real time using a web-cam and an ordinary piece of paper with printed targets. What are the important characteristics of the targets?

1. They must be meaningful to the user.
2. They must be detectable and easily distinguished from whatever will obscure them by the computer.
3. They must have an associated key, mouse or other event to control the computer.

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I describe an idea for a simple and inexpensive tactile display and keyboard for Braille. The key simplification enabling this design is displaying Braille on six finger tips instead of as six tiny dots under one finger tip. The display is arranged in the same format as standard Braille embossers so users read and write in a reciprocal fashion. The display and keyboard might be useful for teaching Braille to blind children, as a communication system for deaf-blind people, and as a reading aid for blinded adults whose fingers are not sufficiently sensitive to read traditional Braille.

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An open-source screen reader for windows written in Python, wxPython, and ctypes. All my favorite tools! I’ve got to upgrade to Python 2.5 so that I can try it out.

Karen suggests that I emulate what Kevin Ivarson did and give feedback on key press to guide the user to the right keys. Right now I record on release but could announce the letters on press to allow the user to get it right before releasing.

Some maps Diane sent to help us think about text-based maps. She said:

I have faxed several maps to you. Eastern Alamance High School is a series of buildings connected by covered sidewalks. On my map, the buildings are shaded yellow. The section with X and circles (bushes) is the outside courtyard. There is a map of Northgate Mall (Durham). I have a poor map of GMS. The last map is a street map of the area around GMS. The numbers on this map correspond with restaurants (see last page).