Entries Tagged Enabling Technology

Ian Bicking’s interesting and provocative blog post on HTML Accessibility is a good read. Empirical accessibility is a good idea. I think by this he means making it work for real users. Fred Brooks’ ideas about the computer scientist as toolsmith seem very relevant.

I’ve been thinking about grass-roots accessibility for a while, though I can’t say I’ve made much progress. It seems to me we have to somehow empower people to enhance accessibility in a bottom up way without much help from developers.

Jonah sent a pointer to AudioSurf, a new game that lets you “ride your music”.

Audiosurf is a music-adapting puzzle racer where you use your own music to create your own experience. The shape, the speed, and the mood of each ride is determined by the song you choose. You earn points for clustering together blocks of the same color on the highway, and compete with others on the internet for the high score on your favorite songs.

It reminds me a bit of our, much simpler, SonicZoom. I think people will really go for the hook of basing the track on the music.

How should an accessible version of this game work?

The Koolu Works Everywhere Appliance and the fit-PC could make nice platforms for delivering ET applications as appliances (or toys) rather than scary computer programs.

Other machines in the same category include:

• TU-40 for $99
• MicroClient JrSX for $85
• eBox4300 for $231

And lots of others.

Engadget has an article on Swinxs, a new game platform introduced at Toy Fair 2008. Its the size of a small drink cooler and comes with RFID bracelets the kids wear. It apparently has some lights and audio output. The included games encourage running around and include stories as well. The part that intrigues me is the promise of an SDK and the ability to develop and share games. Perhaps we could develop some accessible games for kids with various disabilities.

Meg pointed out the Raw Input API for Windows. This would allow us to distinguish among multiple mice and keyboards. It might be interesting to use multiple numeric keyboards as specialized input devices, or multiple mice to provide 2 or 3 switches per hand.

Minh-Tri Pham wrote with info on his PyCV package. This could be very useful for locating kid’s faces for games and therapy for kids who are motor impaired. His demo works fine on my Ubuntu system.

I regularly get requests from teachers at schools that are Mac based for versions of our software that will work for them. I want every kid to have access to our stuff so I bought a Mac mini for development. I’d rather be running OS X in a virtual machine but Apple won’t let me do that. So I’ve got the mini sitting here with its video out connected to one of the inputs on my right projector and I hacked a python wrapper for synergy server to switch the projector source when I move the mouse off my Ubuntu desktop onto the mini. It works great. Combine that with MacFusion for file sharing and routing the mini’s audio output into the line-in on my Ubuntu machine and it is just about as good as a VM would be.

Pygame seems to work fine on the mini so most of what I need is there. Good deal.

But it sure is frustrating to try to get anything else going. First there is hardly any information online. What I find is often out of date and useless because so much seems to change from release to release. Then when something doesn’t work I don’t know who to ask. In contrast on Windows or Ubuntu there are huge and active communities of hackers like me who 1) figure stuff out and 2) write it down where Google can find it. The problem is usually culling through millions of results. On queries related to OS X the problem is I get 5 hits, 3 of which are asking the same question with no answer. The documentation at Apple is horrible and either not indexed by Google or not indexed well. I seriously don’t know why software developers put up with it. I guess they like being pioneers. I just want to get the job done…

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

SerialKeysX is an implementation of the SerialKeys protocol for Apple’s OS X operating system. It allows control of the computer’s keyboard and mouse over a serial connection from devices such as the EyeGaze and other augmented communication devices. You may download and use the software for free.

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Literacy Bridge, a $5 digital audio player and distribution system for electronic books sounds like a great idea.