Access on Main Street

The three major credit reporting firms (Experian, Equifax, Transunion) just announced a deal with the American Council of the Blind to ensure that their website is accessible and their hard copy reports are made available in alternative formats. So now people with visual disabilities can more easily find out that they’re in as much financial trouble as everyone else…

Law Office of Lainey Feingold: Accessible Credit Reports Press Release

There’s a new site, Tag Cow, that lets you upload images, which return with suitable text tags. No tech magic involved; Tag Cow is paying real humans an awesome 4 cents to tag a group of 5 pictures. We could imagine this applied to the many alt-less web images out there, thus improving web accessibility.

Who wants to write a simple utility program that hunts for missing alt-attributes on important websites, forwards the images to Tag Cow, and then sends the webweaver a file with the image filenames and the associated text? Hey, we just write the specs, and we ’specs you to do the real work….

TechCrunch: Need A Job? Make $1.20/hour Tagging Photos

A bunch of forward-thinking British scientists are working on a way to make potentially anything a touchpad–not by changing the surface of objects, but by using a camera to record the blood flow patterns under users’ fingernails to figure out what they’re pressing on and how hard. If this comes to market, we could easily see the concurrent development of mouthsticks or other assistive technologies that would mimic these fingernail patterns for folks without use of their fingers.

Gizmodo: Fingernail watching-cam makes everything a touchpad

Microsoft Research is developing software that listens to you sing and automatically creates a piano accompaniment. The suggested chords can then be adjusted by two incremental variables: happiness (presumably percentage of major vs. minor chords) and jazziness (traditional vs. experimental choices). The interface looks simple enough to be accessible to people with a variety of disabilities, with or without use of assistive technology. Can the waterproof version for the shower be far behind?

Gizmodo: Microsoft Research’s MySong makes musical accompaniment for your singing

The long-awaited trend is already happening in Japan: far fewer people are using “old-fashioned” computers, preferring instead to use products that combine some or all aspects of computer use with other functions, such as smart phones. Will there be concerted, consistent thought given to accessible peripherals? Best case, there could be design revolutions spurred by confluence between the needs of people with disabilities who, say, can’t use teensy or virtual buttons…and the needs of people “without” disabilities who can’t use them either.

SFGate: PCs being pushed aside in Japan

Seth Porges has written an interesting article hypothesizing that the greatest threat to Web 2.0 is (drum roll please) human laziness. After the novelty wears off, most people find it just not worthwhile to keep their Web content updated. We’d bet that someone will eventually respond to this, perhaps by taking advantage of multifunctional devices, to create easier ways to add content on the fly, and that these new ease-of-use strategies will be particularly useful for individuals with disabilities.

CrunchGear: The Futurist: Will human laziness burst the Web 2.0 bubble?

Ariel Shamir, a professor at the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science, has come up with a way to allow images to be intelligently resized, by determining whether individuals pixels do or don’t convey information critical to understanding the image. If this could interact with magnification software, it might help provide much clearer pictures for people with low vision.

Etre: Content aware image resizing