Bumps in the Road Apple?
Apple’s much-expected mobile tablet gizmo may have tactile feedback — electronic bumps on its touchscreen surface to orient your fingers for typing, for example. Such a feature could help blind users find on-screen controls, and even provide braille or other tactile output.
Apple Patent Application Reveals a Bumpy Tablet - apple tablet - Gizmodo
Losing face
The HP MediaSmart computer comes with a face-tracking capability based on “standard algorithms that measure the difference in intensity of contrast between the eyes and the upper cheek and nose.” Apparently “standard” = “Caucasian,” since it refused to work for an African-American fellow per a YouTube video currently making the rounds. We’re inferring that they also don’t apply to people with facial disfigurements such as burns, for whom changing the ambient lighting may not provide a solution. And that, folks, is why you want to put some thought into keeping your testing pool as diverse as possible.
Gadgetell: HP facial tracking software works great…unless you’re black
Hulu whoop
Seems hard to believe it’s been almost three years since we ran across the Blinkx search engine, which returns results based on audio info, and wished that it could also search captions. Blinkx has yet to oblige, but Hulu, bless their hearts, has rallied to provide caption searches as a last-minute addition to our Christmas stocking. Still seems to be in a beta stage (it found several instances of “inconceivable”–although not the one we were looking for–and none of “truthiness”), but holds considerable promise. As a bonus, you can also see a graphic showing which portions of the video have been searched most often, and jump straight to it.
Access Tech News: Search Hulu videos using closed caption text
Come gather round people wherever you Chrome
Expensive third-party assistive technologies such as NaturallySpeaking and JAWS have long included features to make link navigation easier, but it’s only fairly recently that versions of these strategies have been available as free, mainstream browser add-ons. Firefox probably started the trend with LoL; now KeyboardNavigation is available for Chrome. Both of these allow the users to press a hotkey combination and have links labeled with numbers; inputting the number of the desired link will open it, mouse-free.
Access Tech News: KeyboardNavigation does away with mouse clicks in Chrome
Take a gawk on the wild side
iPhone apps with intentional or serendipitous accessibility implications are probably multiplying faster than we could hope to keep up with. But we have to note Lou Zoom, which makes text in the iPhone address book larger and adds some neat functionality for accessing contact-specific information that could have cognitive as well as visual benefits. Plus, it was co-designed by Lou Reed, so now we think he’s sweet, too.
BiDi high-fly?
Bidirectional technology (BiDi) is MIT’s entry into the gesture-based computing arena. It tracks hand location and then moves on-screen objects in response to user movement. As usual, we wonder how precise the movements need to be for correct responses, or whether the sensitivity can be adjusted; worth keeping an eye on.
CrunchGear: MIT creates technology that lets you use the Force
Tweet board of youth
OK, so Tyler Menscher, the first kid to Tweet in utero, is almost a year old, and probably still going through Twitter withdrawl. Fear not, boychik; someone has hacked a Fisher Price Activity Sensor so that sustained pressure on one of multiple inserted pictures results in the sending of a preprogrammed tweet. It’s called the Twoddler (is no word starting with “t” and a vowel safe these days?), but the technical concept has intriguing implications for folks who would benefit from a very simple communication device to relay messages to anyone outside their immediate vicinity.