Access on Main Street

Hate leaving your social networking sites when you have to meet people in the flesh? Now you can have both; aka-aki, a new service from Germany, lets you send and receive information about commonalities with other subscribers within the same brick-and-mortar space, and then use Bluetooth to actually find them. This could be a great means of icebreaking for people with communication disabilities, or for anyone who’d rather put who they are ahead of what they look like.

Times Online: The future of social networking: mobile phones

As we write this, the United Nations is celebrating ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which promotes all kinds of things dear to our hearts, including the need to “Work on and encourage new technologies in all aspects of life that are useful for people with disabilities, especially those that are low cost” and “Provide information about all types of assistance, including technologies, and other forms of assistance, in a way that can be understood by people with disabilities.” Ratification came pretty quickly; we’ll send good vibes that first efforts towards implementation do as well.

BBC: UN celebrates disability treaty

We have yet to quite see the point of Twitter, the online service that lets you keep the world posted on the most minute details of your day (”Retrieved bellybutton lint, 5:04 PM”). But at least now there’s TwitterFone, a hands- and cost-free option for creating Twitter posts via speech recognition of phoned-in updates. As the article points out, this could also be used to create to-do lists for yourself, so maybe there’s a purpose after all.

Gadgetell.com: Twitterfone: why type when you can call in your tweets?

One of the problems for some would-be speech output users is that most speech output strategies require tricky or intense use of the keyboard, mouse, or both; this can be a particular problem for seniors. Some German researchers have come up with a pretty cool solution involving use of facial recognition technology: just close your eyes, and Microsoft Word reads back the “current” sentence (presumably the one where the cursor is located). Ein guter Start; we’d love to see additional features, such as the ability to blink slowly to have the speech output move to and read the next line.

ACM Digital Library: Spoken words: activating text-to-speech through eye closure (summary)

A bunch of German researchers have patented a chip that emits up to 100 different smells. We could see a range of access applications for this–for example, if a particular odor could be tied to a particular caller, then individuals with visual or dexterity disabilities could identify who was calling and decide whether or not to answer without having to fumble for the phone. In any case, makes scents to us.

Gizmag.com: The Smellophone

Sprint Nextel is ending its Voice Command service, which allowed users to store numbers and say names to dial them.  Is this a tragedy?  Not really, but like Hamlet, it is marginally interesting.  Voice Command was a network-based service; that is, the names, numbers, and matching voice files were stored on Sprint’s network.  Now that so many wireless handsets have voice dialing, the network service isn’t that useful (or billable), but the network cost of maintaining it was probably as high as it ever was.

So chalk this up as another salvo in the endless battle between network/shared resources and those feasible in every pocket.

Sprint discontinuing Voice Command on July 1st - Engadget Mobile

A significant majority (61%) of polled Americans said they’d prefer to vote in the next election via text messaging, and the percentage is even higher among those who’ll become eligible to vote by 2016. Reliability issues aside, this could be a boon for people with disabilities–or a nightmare, depending on implementation. How will write-ins be handled? Will the system be able to recognize creative spelling (Barak, Barac, Braq…)? Will verification and confidentiality issues be addressed? We refer anyone interested in the implementation of this strategy to the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines for a comprehensive view of accessibility considerations.

Cellular News: U.S. Cell Phone Users Open to Texting Their Vote for President