Everything but the kitchen sink?
Yummy Kitchen Connect is a conceptual information environment for cooks. It inventories your groceries by scanning bar codes and suggests recipes based on the inventory and blog comments. While you’re cooking, it gives you access via touchscreen to essentials such as WebTV and Skype. Compact enough to fit on your fridge, too. Promising for people with cognitive and dexterity disabilities; not so much for blind folks.
Fingerprint-reading touchscreens
Two inaccessible features in one! Take a touchscreen (barrier to blind and low vision users) and make it sensitive enough to detect fingerprints for security (barrier to dexterity impaired users and people without fingers). Sure, there may be other accessibility advantages to touchscreens — if they’re programmable enough to make them the equivalent of large-button devices. But we’re doubting that anyone will be sharp enough to summon the accessibility-savvy to make that happen.
Sharp’s Next Gen Mobiles to Pack Fingerprint Reading Touch-Screens – Gizmodo
Pictures coming to life
A new type of paper will allow graphics to be printed as usual, then turned into 3-D objects when heated to about 91 degrees. Imagine a kindergarten teacher showing a picture of a rhinoceros to her sighted students, and distributing the same picture in 3-D to her students with visual disabilities…after it’s cooled, of course.
Contents of table
The Time Table “uses a thin electro-luminescent film to turn the entire top surface of the table into a subtle and tasteful digital clock” with very, very large print. Once this gets out of the prototype stage, we could see the concept applied elsewhere to increase both legibility for people with low vision and the in-your-face factor with anyone inclined to be forgetful–imagine using this on an oven door to show how much cooking time is left (nice alternative for those who can’t hear the timer “ding,” too).
Blinkx and you won’t miss it
The Blinkx search engine does for videos what Podzinger does for podcasts: provide search options based on the auditory content within a video. As the cited example points out, this may reduce cognitive load–individuals can search on any phrase they remember from the video, rather than being forced to remember the video’s specific name. It would be great if someday it could also search captions, at least for the microscopic percentage of videos that have ‘em.
Optimus optimism?
Just when we’re ready to give up on the full Optimus keyboard once and for all, developer Art Lebedev tosses our a new press release to re-pique our curiosity. This time, the news is that the keys will be interchangeable, and may come in three flavors: plain old keyboard keys (POKK?), backlit keys, and the OLED keys that have held such promise.
The keyboard has two faces
The Eleksen keyboard has most alphanumeric and control keys on one side, and a calculator and what appear to be music or video controlers on the other. Looks like it’s lightweight and wouldn’t require much activation pressure. We could see some people with dexterity disabilities liking some of the options this provides; e.g., portability, and having the functionality of multiple devices in a single keyboard.