Prime rib directive
A restaurant in Germany has replaced waiters with robots–punch in your order on a touch screen, and it comes down a slide a few minutes later. A step forward for people with communication-related disabilities (we hope the design uses pictograms instead of/in addition to text descriptions); several steps backward for blind folks and the flirtatious.
Love with the proprietary stranger
This accessory lets you plug standard headphones (or audio AT device) into a mobile device equipped with a proprietary jerk jack. Colorful, if a bit more bulky than it needs to be. But who am I to talk?
Coffee, colored
SUCK UK, our new best friends, have created the MyCuppa mug with different color swatches around the inner edge. When the color in the mug matches the swatch corresponding to the way you like your beverage (it comes in both coffee and tea models), you know you’ve poured in enough milk. An interesting mainstream use of non-linguistic cuing.
Talking CD case
For about $5 you can now get a CD case that records and plays back 60 seconds of speech. Use it as an audio label, or as a memory aid to the contents of the CD.
Ruler speaks intelligibly!
This nifty talking ruler speaks the inches as you roll it along. The roller leaves a trail of disappearing ink as well.
Cash in handset
Diebold has consolidated the patent holdings necessary to implement a way to find and control ATMs from mobile phones. That’s right, “dial dough” (our Editor rejected that for the title of this article, because this is a family blog) — dial up, log in, cash out. So now we may have another accessible route to mechanical banking — if we can get enough accessible mobile phones into people’s hands, dammit.
Wireless Week: Patents Could Bring Mobile Phones Closer to ATMs
Gee, Brain, whaddya want to do tonight?
Hammacher Schlemmer now sells Brian the Brain, a voice-activated device that includes a dictionary, a historic time line, a telephone dialer, a clock, a calendar, an MP3 player, and the ability to make small talk. Could be useful as a simple multipurpose aid for anyone with limited dexterity–since it’s originally designed for use by kids, we’re hoping the voice recognition can work well with a range of voices.
TFTS: Remarkable Electronic Animatronic Brain with Encyclopedia and Dictionary