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…
A wonderous bird is the Pelikon
The Pelikon MorphPad can light up different sections of a mobile device’s keyboard based on the active function–just the numbers for telephony, just the control keys for a game. Should be useful for people with low vision, as well as providing cuing to people with cognitive disabilities. Take that, Optimus!
Largesse
Intel has come up with a pretty cool wireless capability. Hook a small box up to a TV, press a button on your laptop, and voila: a large computer display. This has terrific implications for accommodating students with low vision in classrooms and elders in their homes in particular, especially in future product generations when higher resolutions will be supported.
Anandtech: The Best Thing at CES - Intel’s Wireless HD Technology
Pitching a tint
Forthcoming: touch screens for big and small technologies that can be ordered in one of 13 tinted colors. The stated rationale is to “match the body of a given device with its touch screen,” but we have bigger aspirations: Different tints make text easier to read for some people with visual or learning disabilities, and if this can be controlled via hardware many users will be accommodated as soon as they take their equipment out of its box.
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.