Chameleon lamp reacts to ambient background
The Huey lamp senses the color of whatever it’s sitting on and changes to match that color. What we’d love to see as a related product is a lamp with the same type of sensors, but that responds by changing to a light color that would maximize contrast for elders and people with low vision.
OhGizmo: Huey chameleon lamp changes colors to match whatever he’s sitting on
Instapaper auto adjusts contrast based on time of day
Instapaper is a neat little iPhone app that lets you save websites for future perusal. What’s interesting about its latest release is that it lets you enter your location, and adjusts the text/background contrast from dark-on-light to light-on-dark around the local time that the sun sets. Since we all need more contrast as we age, could you also enter your birthdate and have the contrast auto-adjust for that too?
Exquisite control
Oh my, we do like the Sony RM-KZ1 universal remote. Originally designed for kids, its main buttons are all distinct shapes (easy to distinguish by touch for blind folks) and have high-contrast labeling. Plus, it prevents volume from being changed too much too fast. It’ll set you back all of $18 at Target.
Nokia if you got ‘em
You’ve got a Nokia N8 phone. You’ve got a TV or other display with an HDMI interface. You plug the former into the latter, and voila: an instant magnified, touchscreen-style interface for a limited number of functions, such as running a slide show or operating a calculator. More capabilities to come, we hope.
MobileCrunch: Nokia turns any display into a touchscreen with “Plug and Touch.”
Touched by untouching
A company called Cypress is working on TrueTouch technology for mobile device screens. TrueTouch can respond to a finger that is hovering above it, and respond differently to an actual touch. When we first found this article, we thought this would mostly have implications for people with dexterity disabilities, and it could–for example, people for whom any physical contact with the screen would be painful might be able to carry out some functions without requiring actual touch. But what really hooked us was that the demonstration shows how hovering provides magnification of whatever is being hovered over–an obvious boon to many people with low vision, and to some with cognitive disabilities as well.
CrunchGear: Soon you won’t even have to touch that touchscreen
Shine on you crazy keyboard
Hmm…spend $2,400 on an Optimus Maximus keyboard, or spend $10 for fluorescent keyboard labels that will at least let us pretend we have an Optimus. The Glowing Keyboard Stickers could be useful for some people with low vision, but we wish the letters/numbers were in large print.
Horsing around
Oh, how we look forward to the product announcements that come out this day each year. First up: the Pad-Dock, which enhances the iPhone with a touch-screen magnifier so that it has the same large display as an iPad. Hmm…