I posted earlier in the month about disabled activists being arrested outside of Sen. John McCain’s Washington office. I was unsure about the situation and how it was handled, but I found a post from Disabled Soapbox taking us into the action.
Look at the post from the day before for an explanation of the ADAPT community’s demands.
I hadn’t heard about this latest way to video chat online, ooVoo.
A Deaf Mom Shares her World has a great post about her use of the program.
The National Federation for the Blind brought to my attention an issue that I never even imagined could be a problem. Hybrid cars are very quiet. Visually impaired people use their hearing to avoid obstacles like cars. You can imagine the conundrum.
Source: Sheraz Sadiq
More quiet cars in the news
5/8/2008 1:31:00 PM
The dangers posed by silent vehicle technology continue to make headlines, and the general public is increasingly seeing the merits of the point of view of the National Federation of the Blind. Earlier this week, the Press-Enterprise published an excellent article about the problem. The article highlights continued scientific research about the perception of these vehicles by pedestrians, noting that a pedestrian may have as little as one second of warning in which to avoid an approaching hybrid car. Also this week, a Minnesota television station reported that a sighted eight-year-old cyclist had collided with a Toyota Prius that he did not hear. Thankfully, the child was not seriously injured. Jennifer Dunnam, the president of our Minnesota affiliate, was interviewed following this incident and explained the importance of vehicle sound to the blind and all other pedestrians. The television story has also been aired on CNN. In light of these developments, support for the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2008 continues to grow, with twenty-five cosponsors having signed on to H.R. 5734 at the time of this writing. Representative Towns, the sponsor of the bill, has requested that Congressional hearings be held. The National Federation of the Blind is clearly requesting action that will benefit all pedestrians, and the logic of our argument is beyond dispute. VNB will continue to keep readers informed as support for safe vehicle technology continues to grow.
Here’s a good post from Disabled World about home remodeling for universal needs.
It gives good tips for those interested in finding ways to remodel their home so they can stay in it well into their old age, important in the current state of the housing market. These ideas could also be valuable for someone looking to sell their house now and trying to find ways to appeal to a larger market.
Remember a couple of years ago when some MIT students invented an alarm clock that rolled away from you and you had to get out of bed to turn it off? Neat idea, but I would have destroyed it within the first day.
The glove is still in its very early stages and can only read a basic set of motions developed by the inventors, not ASL. But the glove has a lot of potential and has already been programmed to recognize 15 of the 26 letters in the ASL alphabet.
I think something like this could go a long way toward breaking down language barriers between deaf and hearing people, but I doubt the capacity of the glove to ever fully communicate what the deaf person is trying to say.
In my experience with my grandparents and hard of hearing friends, so much of communication is based on a subtle facial expression or body posture. There’s no way the glove could pick up on that. Also, ASL is very difficult to pin down as a language. I have a very hard time reading sign language, because each person has their own slightly different dialect with nuanced variations. I grew up most of my life talking only to my grandparents, and we use our own kind of shorthand for a lot of things. So while I think the glove could be handy for basic communication, say when you’re running errands, I don’t think there’s any substitute for reading the body language as a whole.
Note: I can’t take it from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Site and embed it on my blog, but if you click over to the story on their site, they have a video demonstrating how the HandTalk works.
This is an interview with Bracken Gott. He is a Ph.D student at the Illinois School of Professional Psychology in Chicago. He learned American Sign Language, or ASL, when he was an undergrad at Indiana University. He conducted individual and group therapy sessions with deaf and hard of hearing people at the Anixter Center of Addiction Recovery of the Deaf in Chicago for about a year and a half.
He discusses communication differences between deaf and hearing people, and the role adaptive technology plays in therapy.
Full transcript of the interview after the jump.
Brian McCabe/Medill News
A group of students from Woodson School participate in the opening ceremony of the Illinois Special Olympics.
The opening ceremony for the 40th Illinois Special Olympics was held yesterday at Soldier Field. Along with the participants and volunteers, two students from my school, reporters with the Medill News Service, attended the event. Check out their story for coverage of the volunteers that help make the event so special.
The Illinois Special Olympics Web site has all the information about the 21,000 participants and events that will occur across the state, but there is an interesting story on the site about a young man with autism and verbal dysproxia. Tommy Shimoda competes in the gymnastics events, but is unable to communicate with his voice. Instead, he uses a machine called a VOCA (voice output communication aid) to express himself.
Another example of technology enhancing the lives of people with handicaps and disabilities!
Click after the jump for more pictures from the opening ceremony.
Announcement: The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group announced the publication of WCAG 2.0 as a W3C Candidate Recommendation.
Translation: Very smart people updated guidelines on how to make Web sites, application, and other content accessible to people with disabilities and many elderly users.
The Working Group wants developers and designers to test the WCAG 2.0 and share their implementation experience.
WCAG 2.0 Candidate Recommendation Implementation Information
If you want to give the new guidelines a whirl, let them know by May 23, 2008. Actual implementation is due June 30, 2008.
I did a little deeper research after the last post, and found that there seems to be more of a story than I originally thought with Rite Aid.
In 2000 the National Federation for the Blind, its D.C. affiliate, and several blind individuals sued Chevy Chase Bank, Rite Aid Corp. and Diebold over ATM accessibility issues.
According to the Americans with Disabilities Act, “instructions and all information for use be made accessible to, and independently usable by, persons with vision impairments.” The suit argued that while some of the defendants’ ATMs had Braille keypads and labels, the Braille was an “ineffective accommodation.”
Not all persons who are blind can read Braille,” explains Dr. Maurer, president of the National Federation for the Blind.
“Moreover, Braille keypads and labels are static. They do not provide accessible and independently usable, sequential, computer screen instructions to guide a blind customer through a bank transaction. As a result blind customers basically have little choice but to rely on others to do their banking for them.”
According to the NFB, the only effective means to make ATMs accessible to the blind is voice-guidance technology, which allows blind persons to hear step-by-step instructions. Voice-guidance technology is accessed by plugging personal headphones into a universal audio jack installed in the ATM or by using a telephone handset, also installed in the ATM.
The NFB has long been actively involved in promoting adaptive technologies for the blind so that blind people can live and work independently in today’s technology-dependent world.
Click after the jump for the full text of the press release from NFB and an article about the case from ATMMagazine.com. As a side note, if you click on the link on the headline of the press release, it will take you to the source on NFB’s Web site. This is an outstanding page for the visually impaired. No navigation links, no complicated HTML, nothing that can trip up a screen reader. Just plain text. Read the rest of this entry »
I used to think it was a little silly when I would go to the drive-up ATM and there would be braille on the keypad. If someone needs braille to be able to use the keypad, should they really be driving?
But in reality, tactile keypads are extremely important for people with sight disabilities. With the increasing use of debit cards, sometimes scanning your card at the counter is the only option for payment. If the keypad is flat, a sight-impaired customer is forced to share their PIN with a stranger to complete the purchase. Having braille, or raised key eliminates this security risk and lets the customer do things on their own.
Rite Aid recently announced that it would be undertaking initiatives to improve its Web site to be compatible with the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (w3c) (www.w3.org/wai), and to install equipment with tactile keypads in all of its stores.
