Clock provides visual cues on appropriate sleep/wake times
We’ve previously covered persistent alarm clocks, but never appreciated the need to address a complimentary problem: people who wake up early and don’t realize that others in their household still need to sleep. Now there’s the Stoplight Alarm Clock, which flashes red at “appropriate” sleeping times and green at customary wake-up times. Could be useful for some folks with autism or other cognitive disabilities.
Visual signal for Twitter keywords
In the spirit of Nabaztag, here’s an interesting hack involving an animatronic monkey that waves its arms whenever a keyword appears in a Twitter stream. Good alternative to a beep for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people.
Gizmodo: Super cute Twitter monkey goes bananas when it spots a keyword
Not-so-silly wabbit
Turns out the Nabaztag bunny’s story isn’t over after all…after the original manufacturer, Violet, filed for bankruptcy, the little rabbit became Real got bought up by Mindscape and released in a new version called–oh please–Karotz. In addition to its traditional roles such as reading RFID tags, new capabilities will include a webcam for face recognition.
Still better Windows text-to-speech
Balabolka adds new features to free text-to-speech for Windows. You can import all kinds of files, set the voice characteristics you want, change the speed and emphasis, etc., then export the results as audio files, say for an mp3 player. Note that this is not a screen reader — it’s a utility for producing better-than-average synthetic speech for almost any text you have.
Balabolka Enhances Windows Text-to-Speech with Reading Styles and Audio Export
Like a hand with a cool seven-letter word, or like QWXJJZK?
The first commercial app is now available for the Kindle: a uniplayer version of Scrabble. Can it be used with Kindle’s voice output capabilities? Now that there’s a precedent, will there be other apps that take advantage of Kindle voice output? Will Larry Wanger’s article on Kindle accessibility affect the number of blind users who even buy one? Tune in tomorrow…
Boil howdy
The Boil Buoy gets put in the pot of water you’ve got on the stove. When the water hits the boiling stage, the Buoy gives out a ringing tone. Developed for the mainstream via Quirky, the design-by-consensus website, but we expect blind folks to account for a large percentage of the presale orders necessary for it to actually come to market.
Cloudy captions
Online captions make videos accessible to people with hearing or language disabilities, and make content indexing and searching possible for everyone. There are more than a few online captioning tools. But SpeakerText is a bit different. It uses speech recognition and human transcribers to provide text at $2 a minute plus your volume-based monthly fee, with a turnaround of 48 hours. It stores the synchronized transcript in the cloud, and loads a player when people visit the video on your site, with additional features like search and quote. A good price for an innovative service that may help captions go even more mainstream.
SpeakerText Builds the Missing Text Layer for Online Video [Invites]