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
One order of iPad Thai
Sharp is trying out a restaurant app in Japan that would let individuals browse the menu and place their order by iPad. If implemented with even a soupcon of thoughtfulness, this could address a variety of access issues, from working with VoiceOver to provide an audio menu, to allowing non-literate people to find and select a picture of what they want, to providing a non-verbal ordering strategy for people with speech impairments. Tasty!
Crunchgear: iPad used as self-ordering system at restaurants
You can’t spell “complain” without “LA”
Using an Apple iPhone app, L.A. citizens can now take a picture of a broken sidewalk or other municipal flaw and send it directly to the city government for instant relief. How about reporting blocked curbcuts or illegal use of handicapped parking spaces?
L.A. city government: Residents have a finger on problems with iPhone app – latimes.com
As it is Twitten
Carmen Gonzales has come up with a summary of pretty convincing arguments about why Twitter has made a huge difference for people with physical disabilities. Some of these involve the potential for generating and receiving information with little effort, but there is also the fact that if everyone is communicating in 140 characters, assistive tech users or slow typists will be able to generate messages of an acceptable length with less effort than, say, typing a full email. There are parallel arguments to be made for cognitive access as well.
Twitup: Twitter remaking the persona of the physically challenged
When in Rome, do like a Roman
Now that we think about it, it makes sense: fear of H1N1 may be driving development of touch-free products light years forward. Take the Holy Water dispenser that some Italian churches are installing and which work on the same principle as the auto faucets that have become commonplace in the U.S. The side benefit is that many devout folks who couldn’t use the traditional font should now have a significant measure of accessibility. Let’s hope this technology stays in place after the flu has flown.
New Launches: Auto Holy Water dispenser, Italy’s religious swine flu prevention technique
Comfortably Nimbb
What if you want to get in on social networking, but typing is difficult, or you communicate better by voice or sign language than text, or you just prefer video? Nimbb is a new service that lets you record brief videos and then post them to either a single Twitter-like page or to other types of sites. There is a free option, but paying a monthly fee ensures that your video won’t disappear after 30 days and will be of higher quality. This seems to be the next generation of video Twitter sites such as 12seconds.tv.
Card trick
James Alliban, a Flash programmer in London, has come up with an augmented reality business card; point it at a webcam, and it gives you a 3D representation plus audio–think Leia’s virtual “Help me, Obi-Wan” incarnation. The video still leaves something to be desired; much of the time, the image looks rather like something assembled from colored Post-It notes. However, the audio quality seems quite good, and this could be a way to create talking business cards for the benefit of folks with visual or cognitive disabilities, especially if something more ubiquitous than a webcam (a cellie, mebee?) could trigger playback.