You just might find you can get what you need
Dexterity impairments, like most types of disabilities, come in a wide variety of manifestations. For example, some people with incomplete quadriplegia or arthritis may have a limited range of motion and prefer their input devices to be compact, while some people with cerebral palsy or Parkinson’s may have difficulty with precision and prefer larger target keys. So we think it’s a very happy coincidence that this morning we found two alternatives to the 3.5″ iPhone screen: An iPhone with up to 9″ of screen area, theoretically available in the second half of next year, and a stylus-based watch phone with a 1.3″ screen, available now.
Gadgets Weblog: Who Needs an iPhone Nano - Just get a Special Ops Watch Phone
Has a Ford driven you lately?
Starting in 2010, Ford will be introducing cars that can maneuver themselves into a parallel park, although the driver will still need to control the transmission, gas, and brake. A sensor system will provide visible or audio indicators about proximate objects, including those in the driver’s blind spot. This should be of particular interest to the large and growing number of older drivers.
OLED us into temptation
Another holiday season come and gone, and still no one’s gifted AoMS with an Optimus OLED keyboard. Maybe next year we’ll drop hints for a more modest product from United Keys, which has 9 programmable keys (available as either part of a keyboard or a separate keypad) with high-contrast monochrome displays. Its driver software does something that we’re not sure even Optimus does, which is to recognize the currently active application and load the relevant commands and icons accordingly, reducing the dexterity and cognitive load for any user.
Don’t touch that Apple
Apple is adding to the pile of gesture interface patents with a design that lets finger-swiping motions replace touching the iPhone virtual keyboard for activating commonly used keys (e.g., Return or Delete). What’s particularly interesting here is that different functions are invoked depending on the number of fingers used–swipe one finger to delete a single letter, two to delete a word, three to delete a line. This will probably be of use to some people with dexterity disabilities but not others, based on the nature of their individual capabilities. However, if the motion sensing is reliable and doesn’t require a high level of precision, it could be quite useful to people with visual disabilities. The use of different numbers of fingers to effect different results might also be more cognitively accessible than having to tap or click multiple times.
Some semantic antics
A phrase we expect to be hearing regularly in the next couple of years is “semantic Web,” a way to get an object to behave in context-sensitive ways dependent on the “spotlet” agent with which it’s interacting. The example given in this article is that the icon for a band will play stored MP3 files when interacting with one spotlet, and bring up related YouTube videos when interacting with another. User control is performed via a 2D gesture interface–significant promise for people with cognitive disabilities, unclear usability by people with visual disabilities, likely to be problematic for people with no dexterity.
Measure for measure
The Digital Spoon measures cooking ingredients by weight rather than volume, and seems to have a clear, large print display as well. Will likely be of particular help to cooks with vision or cognitive disabilities. Will not measure soupçons or pinches.
Crunchgear: Add exact smidgens to your gumbo with this cyber spoon
It takes two
Well, here’s one way around touchscreen inaccessibility–create a device, in this case a remote, that includes both a touchscreen and keypad. Looks like it does a pretty good job making the buttons tactilely discernable to blind individuals, too.
CNET: Philips Prestigo SRT9320 universal remote mixes touchscreen with hard keys