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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.

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.

Links I found related to classification.

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

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’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.

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.

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.