New York City’s 911 will receive video
Deaf citizens have been asking for text and video access to E911 for years. Slowly, painfully, community 911 call centers have added support for TTYs. Now New York, New York — the town so hard of hearing you have to say its name twice — appears on the brink of being able to receive live video images from wireless devices. We’d feel better if we thought that someone somewhere had given any thought to integrating deaf and hard of hearing citizens.
House of cards
Have trouble with your credit cards? (No, not that kind of trouble….) While we wait for contactless retail technologies to appear everywhere, here’s a neat solution. The iCache can hold all your credit card info. Then you identify yourself by fingerprint and release the right info to the right terminal: swiper, bar code, wireless, whatever. This could reduce all the fumbling and forgetting that’s going on now.
Cellphone check-in
Some Japanese and European airports are experimenting with allowing passengers to check in for their flight via cellphone (although this won’t let them check bags or bypass security). Sounds like a great solution for anyone who’d have difficulty getting into line, standing in line, or accessing either the self-checkin kiosks or the full service ticket counter.
New York Times: At Some Airports, Cellphones Can Check In Passengers
Pharos the eye can see
The Pharos GPS Phone 600 includes some helpful GPS features–direction calculation, mapping, turn announcements. Sounds like a great navigation aid for people with cognitive disabilities.
Talking Skype chats
Skype, the public VoIP program, now has a plugin that speaks all your chat text. Pretty cool interface, as it cooperates with your voice calls as well.
Wonderful world of color
OK, so even we’re starting to admit to ourselves that the Optimus keyboard might be vaporware. We might have to find consolation with the Luxeed keyboard, which appears to come in two versions: one with black text labels whose key backgrounds can change color, and one with black keys where the text labels can change color. Custom “skins” can be downloaded, or users can program each key individually. This could be great for people with unusual color contrast needs or preferences, or for providing color cues as a cognitive aid–e.g., all vowels could be violet and all function keys could be fuchsia. Availability is unclear, though, since the manufacturer’s website indicates that “the company concentrates its efforts on the distribution of tuna.”
Making it “Fob”
PayPal is introducing a new security strategy: a key fob that generates a single-use numeric password every 60 seconds. Fine, except we seriously doubt there will be a means to access the code via speech ouput, and we wonder if good display standards will be used for the size and color contrast of the numbers. Captcha: the next generation?