Entries Tagged Ideas

Links I found related to classification.

• SHOGUN: SHOGUN Project Documentation
• pychem
• Resources for Discriminant Analysis
• Linear discriminant analysis
• Principal components analysis

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.

Wow! Pete sent me this pointer to Opengazer. I’ve wondered if this was possible but never found a student to work on it. Thanks to Piotr Zieliński for developing it and making it open source. We’ll have great fun with this in accessible applications for people with impaired movement.

Neat ideas that could turned into accessible music fun.

• Beat Blocks
• BeatBearing
• Bubblegum Drum
• KORG Kaossilator

Our games and tools for kids with disabilities should run on whatever computer they have at the school (typically an old PC running some version of Windows or a Mac). One alternative to cross-platform testing might be a LiveCD that boots some OS (say Linux) and runs our software. Then our development environment is fixed and we’re relying on the OS to cover over hardware differences. Pete and I spent a bit of time this last weekend trying our various LiveCDs to see how little memory they could be made to use.

We used VMware as the test platform and tried Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Fedora 8, Puppy Linux, and Damn Small Linux. Something Ubuntu-based would suit me best because it is the environment I know. The results of our casual testing appear to be that 128 megabytes of memory is about the minimum for for the Ubuntu or Fedora livecds to boot properly. That isn’t to say we couldn’t make our own that would require less. Pete found Reconstructor which claims to make LiveCDs configured however you like. I’m guessing we could strip things down to the point that there isn’t even a window manager. If I could get a single OpenGL rendering context that filled the screen I’d be pretty happy for most of our stuff.

I also tried Puppy Linux and DSL. I couldn’t get Puppy to boot live in less than 64 megabytes. DSL would boot live in 32 megabytes but I couldn’t do much else. I’ve ready that PyGame can be made to work under Puppy. I’m hesitant to go in that direction just because I’d be giving up the very supportive Ubuntu community and repositories.

None of these is as promising as I had hoped. I think I’ll take a LiveCD with me when I visit Andrew’s Elementary later this week and see if I can get one to boot on the PC’s there.

Pros of LiveCDs:

• We’re in charge of the environment our software runs in.
• We’d never have to test on Vista
• No worries about the IT department being unwilling to install the software (lots of teachers complain about this).
• Simple for teacher’s to use with no complicated installation instructions

Cons of LiveCDs:

• Apparently requires a pretty beefy machine with 64 to 128 megabytes of memory and CD drive.
• Unclear how many different hardware configurations are really supported in a strict plug-and-play way (no way I’m going to get teachers to type options for the boot command).
• They would be impossible for most users to download because they are so big.
• Intel only (but that hardly matters anymore)

Pete sent a pointer to this video demonstrating drumming with the Wii Remote.