I’m trying out subversion. I’ll make some notes here to help me remember.

To create a new project myproject in my repository I need to:

cd ~/Desktop
mkdir myproject
cd myproject
mkdir trunk tags branches
cp -r path_to_myproject_files/* trunk/
clean up any junk files
svn import ~/Desktop/myproject svn+ssh://gb@cvs.cs.unc.edu/cvs/user/gb/svn/myproject -m "initial import"
cd place_to_work
mv path_to_myproject_files out of the way if necessary
svn checkout svn+ssh://gb@cvs.cs.unc.edu/cvs/user/gb/svn/myproject/trunk myproject

Then in that working directory the commands to know are: svn add, svn update, and svn commit.

So I hacked on CamKeys to add a GUI for configuring all sorts of events. I’ll include a few screen shots below. Now the teachers are recording their own speech and music sounds and hooking them to events on the DDR pad or camera.

The CamKeys roots of this project were funded by the Mozilla foundation.

The source is in CVS at sourceforge uncassist.

These pages are from a typical book at the site.

My friends Karen Erickson and Gretchen Hanser of the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies tell me that children with limited ability to speak or handle traditional books have few opportunities to learn to read and write. While typically developing children have access to dozens or even hundreds of books, severely disabled kids often have access to very few. Imagine being fifteen years old, unable to speak or to reliably use your hands to manipulate a book and getting your first opportunity to read. Books about baby farm animals aren’t going to cut it. You might be interested NASCAR, fashion, or spacecraft but beginner books on those subjects are rare and even more rarely accessible. Could we do something to make creating accessible books easier?

At the Tar Heel Reader site you can select a book and then advance through the pages with just about any of the characters commonly generated by switch interfaces (let me know if you need something not currently supported). You can have each page read out loud by a computer-generated voice if you wish. Also, each book is automatically available for download as a PowerPoint, Impress, or Flash show.

If you don’t find a book to suit your reader’s interest, making a new book is very easy. The book creator wizard guides you through the process of finding pictures on Flickr, and providing a simple sentence to go with each. Then, with the click of a button, you can create a new book that will immediately be available for reading or download.

How it works

I started hacking PHP using the Flickr API and quickly had a primitive book creator wizard working. When I started thinking about all the supporting infrastructure I would need to provide logins, searches, and multiple authors, it hit me that WordPress already had everything I’d need. A blog post by Steve Winton encouraged me to examine the possibilities further. I’m very impressed with the ease of integrating the wizard and switch-accessible reading into WordPress by only hacking on the theme.

I started with the default theme and hacked the css a bit to create more space on the page. Then I created an empty page for the wizard and gave it a custom template containing my PHP code. Working within the page framework in this way gave me access to all the great WordPress functions while leaving me free to program the page however I wished. In the screen shot to the left you can see the wizard in use. The two rows of pictures at the top are the result of a Flickr search for the tag squirrels. The two boxes near the bottom are the pages constructed so far with an area in each for the short sentence for that page. I used the cool Hoverbox Image Gallery css to make the Flickr search images zoom when you move your cursor over them.

The wizard would be much cooler if it used AJAX but the current version is simply a single html form that does a POST to the page URL. At the very top of the code I call the WordPress auth_redirect function to make sure the author is logged in. Then I check to see if the request method is GET or POST. A GET request signals starting to write; all other calls will use method POST. I used the phpFlickr class to manage access to Flickr. When the author has completed the book, pressing the Create my book button uses the WordPress wp_insert_post function to create post representing the book and then redirects the browser to the newly created post.

Each book is simply a multi-page post using the WordPress <!–nextpage–> tag. They have a regular structure that allows me to parse them with a regular expression when invoking the wizard for editing a book. I customized the book display by modifying the single.php file to make a singlebook.php file that is used for posts in the Book category. The singlebook template eliminates the sidebar and other navigation to unclutter the layout. Switch enabling the reading is done with a bit of JavaScript that advances to the next page on a KeyPress event. Speech enabling the books is implemented with another bit of JavaScript that sends the caption text to a speech server that takes a text parameter and uses the Festival text-to-speech engine and the Lame encoder to return an mp3 that I play with the SoundManager2 JavaScript bridge to the Flash player.

Teachers sometimes use slide show tools such as PowerPoint to make accessible books for their disabled students. To support this and to allow reading books offline the title page of each book offers downloading of books in Microsoft PowerPoint, OpenOffice Impress, and Adobe Flash format. I generate the Impress format XML using the PHP DOM functions and the convert to PowerPoint and/or Flash using soffice running as a server with the PyODConverter as described in another post.

Future directions

The book on Jeff Gordon illustrates a possible future direction for these books. I used the built-in WordPress editor to modify the last page to include a YouTube video instead of a static picture. I think we could extend the wizard to include YouTube searches if there is enough interest.

Karen suggested including sentence frames to encourage authors to create easy to read texts. I didn’t understand her well enough to try to implement something. Hey, I’m just a computer guy!

Gretchen would like a way to make whatever book the class is currently reading available in this format. I think we could do something with a web cam and a bit of uploading assistance.

Developing this prototype was both fun and educational for me. If we get enough interest from teachers perhaps I’ll get a group of students to program an enhanced version this fall.

Then I needed to convert the Impress format to PowerPoint. Thankfully, I found PyODConverter to automate that part of the job. It worked fine when I ran it from the command prompt but I get it to find the server when I ran it from PHP. Again the web came to my rescue with a post by Piero. I’ll reproduce the code here so I don’t forget it.

cd /var/www                                      #www-data user home
sudo mkdir .openoffice.org2                      #create the openoffice working dir
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data .openoffice.org2 #set the owner
sudo chmod 700 .openoffice.org2                  #change permissions
sudo -s                                          #you need to be root
su - www-data                                    #if you want to be www-data

#start openoffice headless
xvfb-run -a soffice -accept="socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp;StarOffice.ServiceManager" -nologo -headless -invisible

Now I need to figure out how to get this into /etc/init.d so that it will automatically start on reboot.

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.

Ideas: Content for Route 66, maybe Nascar?
Games that are switch accessible, maybe racing?
Maybe some FYS students could go? How does that work?
Coordinate with Software Engineering and maybe a parallel ET class for CS students.

Scratch for interactive content generation?

Karen has a group at Forest View elementary, kids are using computers to make content of various kinds. For example recording themselves reading books for 1st graders. They could be a good group to get interested in content for device users. Visuals + Audio and simple text could be exciting to author and use.

Look at A to Z phonics website, content isn’t that good but reading level is appropriate, see what books should look like.

Check out Dirty Bertie

Take pictures from good book, get object name and descriptors from teacher and generate really simple sentences like “Butterflies can ______” or “Pirates are ______” to make lots of content quickly. Share on a web site. Make it easy to produce and share content. Patterns like “The noun is verbing” and “The adjective noun is verbing”. Generate text for beginning level reader.

Choose a topic, add descriptors, and generate sentences. Makes a “PowerPoint” or whatever for the teacher to use. Pictures from Flickr or somewhere. Teacher provides topic, gets a bunch of pictures, provides descriptors, system fills words into sentence frames. Make adding pictures easy. Site provides text to speech converted to mp3 and embedded. How about sounds for blind kids?

Something like SamiSays for recording “homework” answers from AAC devices that don’t interface to computers. Teacher/parent plugs device into line-in and computer records audio to send to teacher. Kid listens to questions and answers using their device, app sends mp3 to teacher with the results. Enables kid to do homework independently. Email access too. Use a VERY small number of words as controls for the computer by recognizing them in certain contexts. Provide independent computer access. email via mp3.

nvidia-settings --assign="GPUOverclockingState=1"
nvidia-settings --assign="GPU2DClockFreqs=100,230"
nvidia-settings --assign="GPU2DClockFreqs=100,230"

Yes, I know that I’m setting the 2D Clock Freqs twice. The first time seems to move it to Performance Level 1 and the second time drops it to level 0 where I want to be. I got the numbers from the nvidia-settings on the Power Mizer tab.

I put those commands in a script and run it using the Sessions facility I found at System->Preferences->Sessions.

1 cup White vinegar
1 cup Cider vinegar
1 tablespoon Sugar
1 tablespoon Crushed red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon Tabasco sauce
Salt to taste
Freshly cracked black pepper to taste