iPad gives users more than one finger
As the hallucinatory haze of Apple’s latest product announcement dissipates, tech analysts have begun looking at what the iPad may offer in new features. One clear category is the gesture interface, which is dramatically more powerful than on the iPhone. You can use several fingers at once, including fingers from both hands in orchestrated ways to re-size, rotate, and otherwise control your applications, and the duration of some presses will alter what function you’re performing. Assuming you have, and can use, all of that digital flesh. Without carefully designed alternative input, a sophisticated gesture interface may pose a serious barrier to people who are missing fingers, have difficulty controlling them, or who have trouble understanding the gesture scheme.
The iPad’s Interface and Gestures: What’s Actually New Video - apple ipad - Gizmodo
No iPad jokes from us, no sir
We were going to wait until some of the hype died down before considering the accessibility side of the iPad–but fortunately our friend Ricky Buchanan has already started the process. Looks promising!
All-encompassing
Back when we were a small nerdette, GPS took the form of a game where you would say “Hot” or “Cold” to indicate a searcher’s proximity to a target object. This is close to the idea behind the Kompis, which lets you program target locations, either by downloading coordinates from the Internet or by pressing a “remember” button when you’re actually at the location. Then the Kompis uses a blue light to indicate the direction of the location, and turns the light red as you get closer. This simple, wordless strategy could make it a good cuing tool for navigation by people with cognitive disabilities.
Touchpad in the morning, then just surf away
Scrybe is a software enhancement for touchpads that provides a variety of shortcuts for using the Web, and possibly other applications–e.g., trace a “W” and Wikipedia comes up. We like the potential of this for people who have good control but limited range of motion in their hands. Wonder if users will be able to design and add their own shortcuts?
Squeezing is believing
Puyocon is a forthcoming ball-shaped, wireless cursor controller that can be operated by rolling, squeezing, or throwing. Could be significantly easier to use than a standard mouse for people with some types of dexterity or cognitive disabilities–or maybe for everyone; we were intrigued to note that the design was based on research findings that “a young child’s method of squeezing things was a lot better use of an interface than a mouse or touchpad.”
Greater tuner
We’ve heard of people who’ve been able to play guitar with few or no fingers–Tony Melendez, for one–but figured someone else might have to do the tuning. No more: the Evertune keeps the strings at the right pitch through the use of spring-tension. Will be available built in to some models and as an add-on.
Oh yeah, we REALLY need that…well, actually, we might
Behold the first new punctuation mark of the decade: the SarcMark, which can be downloaded and added to your font capabilities for $1.99. It looks like the short end of a Ho-Ho and is intended to indicate the statement it’s attached to might be somewhat less than sincere and thoughtful. Given the uptick in people with autism spectrum disorders, who are likely to have difficulty identifying sarcasm when spoken let alone when written, it just might find a useful niche.
Gizmodo: Make your sarcasm obvious in Gizmodo comments with the new SarcMark punctuation download