Operator, can you help me place this text?
Trend note: By the end of last year, cell phone users were communicating nearly twice as often by text message as by phone. If cell phone design focuses on this, it’s good news for people with hearing, speech, and vision disabilities–particularly since texting eyes-free is apparently a mark of Cool; if speech output becomes standard, we’re in business. But it’s not so good for people with cognitive or dexterity disabilities, the latter category of course including the RSI-from-over-texting crowd. Let’s not hang up on Bell’s strategy just yet, please.
*Really* open captions
Neuros has a prototype settop box that allows a text stream to be superimposed onto the video image. This could be snarky comments from your witty buddies, or a super-professional captioning service. What’s strong is the idea that the video can come from one place and the captions from another, or many others — the viewer chooses which stream to view. So your choice could be a straight transcription for deaf viewers, or a cognitive support system for complex video programming that needs some additional explanation.
Neuros open set-top box lets you crowd-subtitle the presidential debate - Boing Boing
Thinking out loud
The Army is working on thought-to-speech technology for battlefield use; wired helmets would let soldiers send their thoughts silently and have them translated into speech for their comrades to hear. Apparently this will be somewhat dependent on users being able to think in “clean, clear and formulaic ways.” If this could be adjusted so that it accommodates the range of human thought patterns, rather than vice-versa, it might open the way for a new class of communication devices for people who have physical and/or cognitive difficulty with speech generation.
It could be a contendah
Brando has released their Super Tiny Keyboard for $25; it contains 56 keys in a frame just over the size of an iPhone. Since many keyboards designed for one-handed or mouthstick typists cost much more, this could be an effective, economical alternative.
Sookiyaki
Sook is a concept device that, among other things, can “taste” whatever ingredients are placed on its cutting board, figure out how much of each ingredient is present, and generate recipes accordingly. Depending on the options for presenting the recipes (large print? voice output?), this could be a major independent living aid for people with visual, physical, and cognitive disabilities.
Thinking of a number
Eye control ain’t nuthin’ — try brain waves. The Big NeuroSky (are we mispronouncing?) is working on such an interface, operating a Nokia handset with just the power of thought. Looks like we’ll be placing more of those 900-number calls than we planned.
But this interface, once fully developed and robustly commercialized, could be an answer for the millions of people worldwide who cannot make any reliable, repeatable physical action. Buy it for the phone, use it to run your Xbox and wheelchair.
NeuroSky one-ups NTT DoCoMo, demos mind control for phones - Engadget Mobile
Text-to-teach
A number of university professors are apparently fed up with ever-rising textbook prices and are now posting their tomes online in electronic formats, at no charge. This allows interesting opportunities such as letting teachers “mix and match their work with others’ to create a collection of material for students.” It also nicely solves alternate format issues for people who would have difficulty seeing, comprehending, or manipulating standard textbooks. Fingers crossed that there’s been an effort to follow good design practices such as having redundant descriptive text for graphics, which benefits blind scholars as well as starving students with low bandwidth.