Geeks making the world a bit better.

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Court again rules against US paper money

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.

Releasing the music in your head

Thanks to Martha for pointing out this video: TED | Talks | Tod Machover, Dan Ellsey: Releasing the music in your head (video). Very interesting. I’d love to do something like this for kids. Machover talks about Hyperscore.

Tools for classification

Links I found related to classification.

Marking Up a Tag Cloud

24 ways: Marking Up a Tag Cloud is an excellent discussion of how to implement a cloud using CSS. I hadn’t realized that most ways of doing it are inaccessible. I used his approach to construct my query cloud page.

Ian Bicking on HTML Accessibility

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.

Daylight Savings Wastes Energy

An article in the WSJ reports on a study of energy consumption in Indiana before and after their recent switch to DST. The switch cost them $8.6 million extra for electricity.

AudioSurf

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?

Tiny PCs as ET appliances

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:

And lots of others.

Swinxs looks interesting for accessible games

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.

Raw Input API

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.