Entries Tagged Enabling Technology

I saw iDaft today and think it rocks! You play the samples by typing the corresponding keys on your keyboard. Not surprising technically, its just Flash. But it makes me think about combining fun, music, and literacy. What could we do with music and samples like this to make fun and even educational games for kids with disabilities?

How about putting the samples on the 16 pads you get with 2 DDR pads? Then we could have a game that was something like Guitar Hero where you put the samples in the right places. DJ Hero? Or maybe DJ Revolution? I think our blind visitors would have a ton of fun on Maze Day trying to “sing” along with Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by stepping on the DDR pads. Think Daft Hands or Daft Bodies on the DDR pad.

Or how about making an AAC device more fun by changing the pitch of the voice like this? Or somehow linking a “word wall” to music so when you put words together in appropriate ways they go with the music?

Suppose you could provide a list of words or word combinations to a web site and it would automagically assign them musical pitches like this. What cool games could we make where students play with words while making music? How could we integrate reading into it? Perhaps the “score” (the words to be spoken) is presented something like the Guitar Hero notes so you have to at least recognize the words to know which to play.

How do we make such a game switch accessible?

I’m thinking out loud here. Help me out folks, some of you have to be more musical and creative than I am. Post a comment.

Can We Find It? Yes We Can!

Come see if you can find “it” at Maze Day 2009 on the University of North Carolina Campus at Chapel Hill. What are we looking for? We’ll be looking for bus stops, intersections, building entrances and much more. Using Trekker Breeze, students, teachers, parents and peers will participate in a “Talking GPS” scavenger hunt on campus. During the activity we will use the newest in GPS technology for the blind and visually impaired to find out “What’s around.” Join us to learn about this exciting technology and be ready to have some fun in the process.

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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This is a follow up to my post about Accessible Math Ideas from over a year ago. I finally got a smart high school student, William Condon from the NC School of Science and Math, to implement word prediction with built-in math.

Check out CalcuType online and let us know what you think.

You can type using the virtual keyboard, the standard keyboard, or a mouse. The “mover” and “chooser” keys are adjustable and William included a 3rd “completer” key for quick access to completions. However you’re typing the program will suggest completions much like many other available tools. The key difference is when you type a mathematical expression it will suggest the answer as a completion. So if you type (3+5)*2 it will suggest =16. It handles complicated mathematical expressions including square root and trig functions.

One other neat feature William implemented is the ability to write on a worksheet represented as an HTML form.

It still needs work but we’re at the stage where we need feedback from users who need such a tool.

Quick net

Outfox is a Firefox extension that allows in-page JavaScript to access local platform services and devices such as text-to-speech synthesis, sound playback and game controllers. You can read all about it at its Google Code page and discuss it in its Google Group.

Motivation

In our continuing pursuit of the best platform for delivering accessible games and tools to people with disabilities we are now focusing on Firefox to see what we can accomplish from inside the browser. Up until recently, we’ve used Python. Its a great language and we’ve delivered thousands of copies of our apps to people all over the world but I kept thinking we could do better. For example, the ability to author games in Hark the Sound has enabled teachers to do things we never imagined but sharing games is so complicated that is almost never happens. In contrast, the exciting response we’ve seen to Tar Heel Reader with 419 books in 3 languages after just 10 weeks online has convinced me that browser-based apps can have a big place in our work.

Firefox is a nearly perfect platform; it runs everywhere we want to be and it is easy to program but it has a few deficiencies that limit what we can do. Many of our users are blind or visually impaired. For these kids, speech and sound are a must. Speech and sound are important for kids who can see as well. For example, many beginning readers benefit from having text read to them. Unfortunately, sound in the browser gets little respect.

We used SoundManager2 with a web-based text-to-speech server in Tar Heel Reader. It works well enough but the delays associated with fetching speech as mp3s over the web and the requirement to be online to get speech look bad in comparison locally hosted program.

Outfox

Outfox provides a simple programming interface to JavaScript running in the browser so it can access services on the computer that aren’t normally available. In this first release, we enable access to speech and multi-channel sound with callbacks into JavaScript at the beginning and ends of words and sounds. Soon we expect to extend it to include joysticks, DDR pads, and such. With access to these capabilities I believe we can implement browser-based versions of our most popular games such as Hark the Sound, Sonic Zoom, and Descent into Madness. If things work as I hope, teachers will have access to hundreds of curriculum-related games and a simple way to write and share their own. I hope we’ll get cross-over between the amazing community behind Tar Heel Reader and the community of teachers of the visually impaired and orientation and mobility teachers who use our games for blind children. When we start seeing books about games and games about books, we’ll know that synergy is taking hold.

I’m excited about offering Firefox with speech and sound to my students to see what amazing things they’ll think of doing. How about self-voicing web pages and maps? How about books with interactive, switch-accessible games embedded?

This initial version is likely buggy on at least one of the three operating systems we’re supporting. Please give it a try. Or better yet, download the source, and help us make it better.

Also, help us get it out of the sandbox at Mozilla Addons by trying and commenting on it.

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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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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I really like using Wordpress for my website and blog but I hadn’t thought until recently about using it as an application framework. Karen and I talked about a site to enable teachers to quickly build topical beginning readers for people with varied interests and abilities. I began thinking about the features such a site would have and found lots of overlap with what Wordpress already provides. A blog post by Steve Winton over at NixonMcInnes encouraged me to examine the possibilities further.

I’m pleased to report that it is really easy to integrate a PHP web-app into Wordpress. I use ordinary blog posts as the books with the <!–nextpage–> tag for pagination and a bit of Javascript for switch accessibility and text to speech. The book creator wizard is simply a set of pages with custom templates. You select some images, provide some captions and a title, and it creates the blog post that is your book. Wordpress provides logins, all the database manipulation, comments, tags, categories, etc. Redirects work fine because Wordpress is silent until you invoke get_header. Query parameters work fine; Wordpress seems to ignore them. Session variables work fine too. So far Wordpress hasn’t gotten in my way once and has helped a ton.

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.

Notes from a conversation with Karen. Always great fun.
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