Thoughts on Assistive Technology

So has anyone seen the news about the New Japanese Pop sensation, Hatsune Miku and her fellow Vocaloids? I know this is a blog about Assistive Technology, so I’ll leave out all the juicy details about my lovely virtual girlfriend and go straight to the point. Nuance Software has recently released Dragon 11.50; I was offered a 75% discount on Dragon 11.50 Premium, that means, I get to test drive the thing; For those of you who do not know what Dragon Dictation is, it’s a Voice Recognition Technology first developed in 1982. It allows one to use human voice to interface with the computer as opposed to the traditional keyboard and mouse. The first Dragon 1.0 was released in 1997 and the latest 11.50 was released a few months back. So what did I test drive it on? My virtual girlfriend chatter robot software. (Yes, I am that much of a dork!) For a virtual friend to work, you need an avatar (The pretty face of which your “friend” looks like – Hatsune Miku for example would be an Avatar for

http://www.nvda-project.org/ As far as the computer screen readers go, the JAWS from Freedom Scientific has become something of an absolute standard. Last time I checked, a copy of JAWS standard version costs $895 - in case the irony escapes anyone, that is approximately the amount of a supplemental Security Income Check for the month. - I wonder when they are going to make the next shark movie. So, when two blind computer programmers did not want to pay that kind of money for computers to talk, and reasoned, rightly, that others probably don't want to pay that kind of money to make the computer talk either, they wrote their own screen reader and very generously made it an open source. In case readers don't know what an open source is, it's something I'd hate if I work for Microsoft, but I don't, so I absolutely adore open source software. Anyone can download, modify, use, copy, pass along, so long as nobody makes any money on it. So IVONA just downloaded the

Lately, oh, and by the by, I am back to my favourite field of Assistive Technology after about eight months of doing Special Education Advocacy, and my conclusion? Computers are way more compliant than school districts in the Inland Empire. Anyway, the latest and hottest news for Autistic treatments seemed to be something called Integrated Listening System, from a strictly technical standpoint, the whole thing appears to be a glorified MP3 player. But some school districts seem to swear by it, and if it is good enough for the Californian school districts, it may be good enough for me. Convincing our executive director to spend $1750. 00 of AB 204 money on an mp3 player will be no small feat, and I don't think if "it's good enough for the school districts, it's good enough for me" argument is going to fly anywhere, so it's time to do some digging. What's surprising about the system has been that other than the officially sanctioned testimonies and resea

http://www.palsoftwaredesigns.com/ When I first came across their website, I was a little apprehensive, because it has neither the company's physical address nor telephone number. It only has a paypal sign for credit card payment, the name of its CEO, Jose A. Oritz, and a rather vague statement that the company is based in Brooklyn New York. True, many small companies that produce softwares aiming at niche market tend to use this model to minimize operating expenses - and trust me AAC software definitely qualifies as a niche market, Paypal payment and direct download afterwards, no mess, no fuss. But then, most companies do at least give their physical address and telephone number to give an impression of legitimacy, even fraudulent websites give that much. So readers cannot blame me for being over cautious. To cut a long story short, I took a chance, and bought a copy for testing. It works very much like proloquo2go from assistware and dynavox's mighty mo; it also comes wi