Access on Main Street

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

Cloudy captions

Posted by Jim Tobias 12 September 2010

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]

LookTel

Posted by Jane Berliss-Vincent 23 March 2010

Continuing in the parade of useful smartphone apps: LookTel (price TBD), uses graphic codes, image recognition, and live human support to identify and announce any object you point the camera at. It’s touted for blind folks, but we think it’s got even more applications for cognitive assistance, especially for people with aphasia and similar injuries for whom a little assistance could head off a whole lot of frustration. 

Crunchgear: LookTel, an app for the blind

PhoneTag Live, you’re it!

Posted by Jim Tobias 13 January 2010

Ditech Networks (not the lenders) has had a voice mail transcription service for a while.  Now they’re offering live transcription for conference calls.  This is a mainstream version of the real-time captioning service that’s been available for deaf and hard of hearing participants through specialty service providers.  Going mainstream often has payoffs in quality, variety, and price; what will the future of live transcription bring?  Right now it’s on the phone; will we see live follow-me transcription bringing captioning into every environment?

PhoneTag Live Transcription for Conference Calls available now from Ditech Networks | Business Wire

Layared look

Posted by Jim Tobias 20 August 2009

Layar is billed as the first commercially viable augmented reality service.  For Android devices, aim your camera at any location or object that’s been indexed — a fort, a bar, a train station — and information pops onto the screen, with arrows and captions and everything.  They’ve got content from Wikipedia and other sources, and claim to have 500 developers working on content and apps.  There are some great opportunities here, as we’ve said before, for people with hearing, cognitive or visual disabilities.

Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Layar Reality Browser 2.0 Launched Globally

Tubal location

Posted by Jim Tobias 12 July 2009

If your wireless device has GPS and a compass, this new soon-to-be-an-iPhone-app projects info onto the camera image, showing you how to find the nearest underground station.  If you’re in London, that is.  Location-aware augmented reality apps like this will open up a new world of guided navigation for people who are blind or disoriented.  If they’re in London.

rb.trends» Blog Archive » Augmented reality

Field of Near-Field Communication is … near

Posted by Jim Tobias 9 April 2009

Near-Field Communication — we’ve been telling you about it for years — is about to enter the real retail world, letting consumers pay for purchases without swiping a card or signing.  Just having your NFC-equipped mobile device near the store’s point-of-sale terminal will complete the transaction.  Nokia built the first device; now Visa rolls out the first version of the payment part of the service.

Aside from eviscerating the “Close only counts in horseshoes” aphorism, NFC offers fumble-free, keyless shopping for those with limited dexterity and/or vision.   Let’s hope the retailers preserve that when they implement NFC.

Visa rolls out its first commercial NFC payment system

Gaze in the millinery

Posted by Jim Tobias 22 March 2009

We’ve reached the point where a camera-based gesture interface, a pico-projector, and wireless computing has come together in SixthSense, a wearable prototype that lets the user grab information about anything in the vicinity.  Aim at a package on a supermarket shelf to see its environmental information; aim at a building to take its picture or see its layout in a map view; project a telephone keypad onto your hand and dial away.  Information that’s rich and relevant.

Right now, of course, you have to be able to see pretty well, be able to point your head at a target without shaking, and be able to move your hands and fingers accurately and consistently.  But we’re gonna fix that at today’s meeting, right, gang?  OK, everybody push on the big steel lab door!

There’s a video of this prototype in operation.  (Forget our negativity — this thing is bangin’.)

Make: Online : Wearable metadata

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