Entries Tagged Deaf

Steve pointed me to an interesting article about using PlayStation Portables with children who are deaf.

I’m continuing to think about the usb visual alert for people who are hearing impaired. Tonight I saw this article on writing a linux USB driver and it points to this source of cool controllable LED lights.

Looking a bit more reveals this post on how to control USB power. With that we could use a really cheap USB lamp as the indicator.

Gretchen pointed me to this page at the CITEd research center. Lots of interesting links to research and strategies for using multimedia to help students.

In reference to my earlier post about the USB-driven visual alert for people who are hearing impaired.

Using the INSTEON api we can control any appliance plugged in to their receiver. I believe the receiver can be plugged in to any outlet in the house. On the computer, we’ll just need to look for incoming email or IMs. While we could implement something that actually checks for mail (requiring their password) and interfaces somehow to whatever IM client they use, I’d rather try to do something independent of all that.

I suggest we try allowing the user to draw one or more small watch boxes anywhere on the desktop. If the pixels in the box change, we activate the signal. This would allow us to monitor whatever visual indication the applications already provide. For example, on GoogleTalk I have a small “balloon” icon down in the system tray; it blinks when a new IM comes in. Likewise my email client changes its taskbar button when new mail arrives. I’m suggesting we could simply watch for changes on the display to drive the signal.

If it turns out that doesn’t work, we should try using our pyAA interface to watch for events on the accessibility interface.

MobileASL is a video compression project at the University of Washington with the goal of making wireless cell phone communication through sign language a reality.

Shelley Tabakman of the NC DHHS asked about some sort of visual alert for hearing-impaired users of email and IM. They’d like to be notified of an incoming message by a signal visible when not looking at the screen. The INSTEON developer kit looks like the right goods.

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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The tiny pager motors (VPM2 from Solarbotics) work great with the USB-1024HLS. I can drive them with the 15mA source capacity of the USB-1024HLS. Using duty-cycle modulation I can control the strength of the vibration. The 4-wire cable I used for each set of 3 is too stiff allowing vibration to couple from one to the next. I’m going to switch to long flexible pairs stripped from a flat cable. That should allow more freedom in placement and less coupling.

I bought a USB-1024HLS from Measurement Computing for an experiment with tiny pager motors as a cheap Braille display. For $149 you get a tiny brick with screw terminals. It works great. Their library is easy to use from Python using ctypes. I’m guessing USB timing limits it to 125 updates per second. I’ve got it blinking LEDs while I’m waiting on the pager motors to arrive.

Alex says the Brew development envrionment for Qualcomm phones is free. Perhaps we could do the Morse-code text messaging for deaf-blind people with that.