Access on Main Street

Hooking up a usable world, one mainstream product at a time.

Mike’ll more?

Posted by Jane Berliss-Vincent 29 February 2008

The Roadrunner Bluetooth headset snuggles up close to your larynx to reduce ambient noise–and possibly work better than traditional headsets for people with some types of speech disabilities. Please tell us it goes great with speech recognition software…

Gadget Review: Navy Seal Bluetooth style headset

Light conversation

Posted by Jim Tobias 2 January 2008

Holy talking light switch covers, Batman! Yes, that’s right: record your 20 second message and this gadget will repeat it whenever one of the switches is turned on or off. Probably intended to hold “Turn me off when you leave”, it might just as well hold “Go back to your room”. Too bad it doesn’t say different things for “on” and “off”, but as a memory aid or simple communication device, $13 is pretty cheap.

Parrot Digital Messaging Light Switch Cover

Tweet talk

Posted by Jane Berliss-Vincent 26 December 2007

The avian market has long been demanding its own toy resembling a cell phone, and human developers have finally responded. The Talk ‘N Play Bird Toy holds four MP3 phrases, and the buttons light up when pressed. Not clear if the MP3s can be changed; if they can, this could be a super-simple, super-cheap, lightweight augmentative communication aid–and since it has a mirror, it might be used for basic speech therapy as well.

Doctors Foster and Smith: Talk ‘N Play Bird Toy

Will it Blendie?

Posted by Jane Berliss-Vincent 30 November 2007

Blendie is a prototype device that consists of a 50+ year old Osterizer ramped up with hardware and software. Growl in low tones and it blends slowly; raise your pitch and it speeds up. Fuhgeddabout the developer’s woo-woo assertion that “[t]he experience for the participant is to speak the language of the machine and thus to more deeply understand and connect with the machine.” Its real destiny is as the perfect margarita maker for people with both dexterity and speech disabilities.

MIT Media Laboratory: Blendie

Gee o geotagging

Posted by Jane Berliss-Vincent 22 October 2007

The just-about-released Apple Mac OS 10.5 (”Leopard” to ailurophiles) will support geotagging, which is a way of generating a map based on the coordinates of where a digital photo was taken. Imagine the possibilities for people with speech disabilities to be able to communicate where they’ve been, or for people with cognitive disabilities to figure out how to get back to a favorite place.

CrunchGear: Leopard to support geotagging

Prime rib directive

Posted by Jane Berliss-Vincent 31 August 2007

A restaurant in Germany has replaced waiters with robots–punch in your order on a touch screen, and it comes down a slide a few minutes later. A step forward for people with communication-related disabilities (we hope the design uses pictograms instead of/in addition to text descriptions); several steps backward for blind folks and the flirtatious.

Gizmodo: Robot-Staffed Restaraunt Launches in Germany

Ball talk

Posted by Jane Berliss-Vincent 30 July 2007

The Soundball looks like an ordinary soccer ball, but it’s been outfitted with motion sensors that “knows whether it’s being hit, thrown, or spun.” This information is then transmitted, via Bluetooth, to a computer, which produces different noises based on how the ball was handled. We could see this modified and used as a very simple communication device, particularly for individuals with disabilities like autism that do not necessarily affect their agility; for example, kicking the ball could produce the computerized response, “I’m hungry” while spinning it could produce “I’m tired.”

Core77: Aleksei R. Stevens’ SoundBall

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