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
Yakkity yak
The Conversacube is a small box that “listens” to ambient conversations and provides the user with cues about chiming in. Theoretically created for the shy, but could easily be helpful for people with disabilities such as autism, and possibly as a supplement to lipreading for some Deaf folks as well. That is, as long as they’re not too put off by the ugly green color.
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.
Sync and swim
YouTubeSocial is a website that lets you load a video and notify all your pals so they can watch it along with you, IM-ing all the while. Anyone else thinkin’ this could be a great tool for providing on-the-fly real-time captioning?
Gizmodo: The simplest way to watch cute YouTube videos in sync with friends
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]
GPS crustation
Japanese drivers with left/right dyslexia have a new friend in NaviRobo, a small crab robot that syncs with the Pioneer GPS system and points its claws in the direction you’re supposed to go–a rather elegant non-verbal navigation strategy. The same idea modified into a handheld version could help deaf-blind pedestrians, too.
Gizmodo: GPS crab guides the way with highly accurate claw gestures
Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
We were going to just laud the push towards real-time cell phone video as being good for sign language conversing and leave it there. But with the omnipresent development of apps, there is also potential for enhanced augmentative communication–imagine, for example, that someone who feels most comfortable communicating via pictograms could actually send and receive graphics via video rather than relying on translation into an audio format.