Nifty miscellanea from ‘06
For the second time, David Pogue has published a list of 10 great product features from the waning year; also for the second time, several of these features are AOMS-approved:
- Apple’s power cord that attaches magnetically–no pushing, or pulling, or fumbling to find the exact connection location, required.
- Clickable trackballs on the BlackBerry Pearl–easier to access.
- A feature of the voice recognition software that’ll be part of Vista. You won’t need to say the name of an item you want to activate; just say “show numbers” and every clickable area will get assigned a number. Saying the number emulates a mouse click in exactly the right area. This makes the necessary vocabulary smaller, possibly making recognition easier for people with non-standard speech.
Here’s to an even longer product list in 2007.
Open source navigational aid
TomTom, the popular GPS-based navigation system for vehicle use, now has an open source community dedicated to expanding the software options for TomTom users. And that’s pretty easy to do, since the basic TomTom units run Linux, the open source platform. Imagine all the accessibility possibilities, including a talking interface! Isn’t that path a more effective way to go than a separate system just for blind users? Are we missing something here?
Jott
Jott is a new, free–at least for now–service that will turn cell phone messages into text using voice recognition. Interesting potential for use by Deaf people or people who find computers easier to access than phones for whatever reason. Word is that the recognition is pretty good, although we’re always skeptical that the full range of voice characteristics (e.g., accents, dysarthria, adolescence) has been tested.
The look of music
Visual Acoustics is a website that lets you move your mouse to “play” up to eight different musical instruments simultaneously. Each instrument is accompanied by a distinctive visual representation and can be adjusted, so that you might be hearing the harp twice as often as the guitar. We tried out both the application and the instrument definition with the built-in mouse emulation utility StickyKeys, and we’re happy to report that it worked pretty well.
VoIP me, baby, one more time
Move over, Nabaztag; for those who prefer monsters/bubblegum pop singers (is there a difference?) as VoIP interfaces, there’s now Verballs. They wiggle their hands and flash lights to signal an incoming call, and allow ringtones to be downloaded to provide auditory cues as to who’s calling. USB powered and headphone compatible, too.
Voodoo that USB do
It was probably inevitable that the mighty power of technology would eventually be used to create voodoo dolls with USB plugs. Torture the doll, and imprecations show up on your screen. We don’t know if hitting a specific spot reliably brings up the same text…but if it does, and if it can be activated by a mouthstick as well as by an icepick, this might be an interesting model for a simple communication device.
Here comes the sun
The Suntimer lets you set parameters related to how much time you should be spending in direct sunlight, “such as skin type and the protection factor of sunscreen in use,” then measures UV radiation and lets you know when to duck for cover before becoming crispy-fried. This would be great for some people with cognitive disabilities, as well as those with spinal cord injuries whose temperature sensitivity is impaired.