Thoughts on Assistive Technology

Dear Amazon,   You may or may not remember when we met at CSUN conference, I kept on stressing to you, that you need to, 1, update your old system and devices, and 2 do something about your app eco system, I don't know if what I said made sense to you back then, but this week, I read something on CNet about  http://www.n2aos.com   For about twenty dollars people can upgrade old kindle fire hd to stock vanilla tablet running Android jelly bean and running Google play, if this is allowed to continue, your model of selling device at near cost will no longer make sense, because people would just buy your device and convert them into Google when the time comes, the only way you can forestall this from happening is to come up with your own jelly bean upgrade on old devices. Or you can be a jerk and sue the people... Yours ever so faithfully Luke

For the last several weeks, I have been fawning over swype, SwiftKey Flow, trace typing, and such; I have also been wishing for a way to retire my physical keyboard and use flow typing for my PC, SwiftKey company even made an April fool joke out of the topic called flow hard. Guess what, with the advent of the chrome remote desktop, flow hard is about to flow into reality… First of all, what is the chrome remote desktop? The technology is not new,. If you remember PC anywhere from the late 1990s, such technology had always suffered from either insufficient processing power or Internet speed neither problem exist in 2014, since my smartphone has as much processing power as my desktop computer at home, the speed bug of the 90s is unlikely to be much of an issue. A potential problem with this technology, though, is that it threatens to turn the world into a hacker’s paradise and therefore, a nightmare for It professionals, even I have concerns about the security implicatio

SwiftKey keyboard Alright, this is an experiment long overdue, this is the first time in my life that I am attempting to compose an essay using something other than the traditional qwerty keyboard and desktop computer, if this proves to be faster and more accurate way of digital input, the obvious implication would be that it is time to retire the long time companion and get on with the times, which can also mean that the desktop computer sitting on my desk and in my office will soon be obsolete, except for gaming, desktop computers are fabulous for gaming. I have recently, learned about swipe typing, but it did not take long before I discovered SwiftKey, a mobile app from London based software company, which I dubbed swipe typing on steroids, it has all the essential features of swipe typing but also has a cloud dictionary and vocabulary learner, so if you are not too paranoid about privacy, it will analyse your email and determines which vocabularies you use the mos

Swype away - a reflection   It is old news, but I have recently, yes, only recently, got friendly with swype input, (as someone who has the word "technology" in his job title, the shame and dishonor such wilful neglect has brought upon my person is incalculable, but thanks to my new state of the art Android phone, I have the chance to turn this narrative of shame into a narrative of redemption, and nobody needs to commit hara kiri!     Oh, and in case you do not yet know what Swype is, it is a word made up of swipe and type, it’s the input mode where your finger goes from B to E without stopping when typing the word, “because”.   I first came across the Swype technology at annual CSUN Conference on disability in 2011, but respectfully ignored it, because I figured that there's nothing swype can do that typing with auto-correction and/or word-prediction can't do faster. Strictly speaking, I wasn't far off; for someone with minor motor skills imp