Access on Main Street

Designer David Chacon has come up with a small remote for controlling devices all over the house. Besides the convenience for people with mobility disabilities, we particularly like the large, intuitive iconography–no reading capability required–and the potential for creating custom icons for specific products.

Dvice: Universal remote concept reminds us of the all-in-one gadget dream

We’ve posted a good bit about CAPTCHAs, the automated techniques that try to distinguish humans from vile software bots when visiting websites or registering for accounts, such as the blurry letters you have to type into a box. It’s an arms race between CAPTCHA designers and bot designers, with visually impaired users as collateral damage.

The latest design calls for users to click near the geometric center of any image in a composite set of wall-to-wall images drawn from a database. That’s only step one; step two shows you another image, which you must identify from a list of options. They’re gonna have to get really creative to figure out a non-visual approach to this task. And hey, webmaster, is your site’s porn late medieval Italian poetry really worth all this effort?

Ars Technica: Researchers stay step ahead of bots with image-based CAPTCHA

The three major credit reporting firms (Experian, Equifax, Transunion) just announced a deal with the American Council of the Blind to ensure that their website is accessible and their hard copy reports are made available in alternative formats. So now people with visual disabilities can more easily find out that they’re in as much financial trouble as everyone else…

Law Office of Lainey Feingold: Accessible Credit Reports Press Release

 We’ve been posting on pico-projectors for a while, those tiny projectors planned to replace or supplement the screens on mobile products.  Now one has actually reached the market, a media player.  The relevant concerns? People with impaired dexterity may not be able to hold these products well enough for convenient use.  And will the projected image be bright enough?  This one is rated at 9 lux (for a 53 inch image), which is less than a footcandle — the brightness of a surface illuminated by a single candle held a foot away.  A smaller image may be bright enough to use, depending on ambient lighting conditions.  We’d be less worried if we knew there had been some attempt to factor in the needs of users with relevant disabilities.

PMP: Sunvision PMPP, World First Media Player With Pico-Projector

The Ah-Choo! box not only holds facial tissues, but when you approach it emits one of five sounds that mimic your upper respiratory system in full distress. Interesting model for auditory cuing; we could see it applied to other types of objects that would be harder to find and/or identify.

Ubergizmo: Ah-Choo! box

We hadn’t heard anything from our buddies Suck UK in ages, so we’re happy to report that they’ve now come up with a line of glow-in-the-dark spray paint. Originally designed for taggers, we can see it also being implemented for in-house (in-hotel, in-dorm…) use by anyone with low vision just trying to find their way to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Gizmodo: Glow-in-the-dark graffiti makes street art ravetastic

A bioengineering professor at UC-Berkeley has developed microscope attachments for cell phones, one with 5x power and the other with 60x power. The original use is for performing medical work in remote areas, but we could see the 5x lens also used as an inexpensive ($75) add-on that turns phones into portable CCTVs for magnifying small amounts of text.

Technology Review (MIT): Remote microscopy