Beam me up, Numi
Most of us have wallets or keychains bursting with loyalty and membership cards for various stores, and it doesn’t even take having a disability to experience difficulty finding and retrieving them when needed. Enter the Numi Key, which stores all your card information electronically, then lets you retrieve as needed and wirelessly transmit to a POS device. The display looks pretty legible (can we beg for a voice-output option in a future release?), and the buttons could well be tactilely discernable.
The Gadgeteer: Consolidate your loyalty cards into one device
Genuine simulated tactility
Toshiba is exploring artificial texture for touch screens. By changing the charge on a surface film, the device will present the user with simulated rough, smooth, or fuzzy textures. This could work well for blind users, who would be able to distinguish buttons and controls on a touchscreen, one of the major barriers to those ubiquitous input systems.
Tempdot by the fruit of another
Some good ideas just scream “Yanko Design” even before you click on the original link. Today’s example: the Tempdot faucet, which has no handles. Instead, you touch one of nine dots whose color corresponds to the approximate temperature you want; the water then begins to flow at that temp. Great for dexterity disabilities; could be easily modified to be tactile for the benefit of people with low or no vision.
Miniguru
The proposed Miniguru keyboard goes our old friend Optimus Maximus one better. Like the Optimus, it allows you to customize the key functions and displays–but it also allows you to specify whether you want the keys to be “clicky,” “tactile,” or “linear.” Not clear whether you could actually do this key adjustment at will (we’d love that) or whether there would simply be different models available. Regardless, this would be great not only for people with various types of dexterity impairments, but also for elders who have been reluctant to use computer keyboards because the touch feels so different from the typewriters they’re used to.
Gboard
Gboard is an interesting example of a product that will meet some accessibility needs, but with a little more design consideration could have met even more. It’s a plug-and-play pad with keys for 18 of the 69 Gmail shortcuts, plus an Escape key. For people who would have difficulty memorizing the shortcuts (or just don’t want to), just the existence of the product is helpful. As another cognitive aid, it groups and color-codes keys with related functions, although providing more variations in key shape would have made this accessible to blind users (only the Open/Close key is a different size than the others). Each key has both a icon and text label, which provides great cognitive access, but the text appears to be quite small, in all caps, and with less-than-optimal contrast against the background, which will pose legibility issues for some people with visual and learning disabilities. We’ll assume the keys require no more than standard activation force, so it could provide dexterity accommodations.
Playing close to the chest
OK, let’s say that your dexterity limitations don’t match the killer version of Smoke On The Water that you know you have inside. Introducing ThinkGeek’s playable guitar t-shirt, also available in a drum model, that would be perfect for folks who have some range of motion but wouldn’t be able to actually hold an instrument.
Puff the magic interface
Never mind that flat touch screen displays are almost always inaccessible to blind folks. They’re also aesthetically ooky to all of us who are used to feeling resistance from a pressed button, key, etc. as tactile confirmation that we’ve actually made contact with what we’re trying to operate. Chris Harrison, a student at Carnegie Mellon, is working on a flat panel display with pneumatic components that allow for concave and convex interface elements. Could be just the touch of genius necessary to bring universal access to the cellie age.
Chris Harrison: Providing Dynamically Changeable Physical Buttons on a Visual Display