Thoughts on Assistive Technology

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 th...

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 res...

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 with a full set of Dynavox PEC picture...

Let's make one thing straight, Amazon Kindle is not Apple iPad, for one thing, the functionality of kindle is not on par with Apple iPad, it was designed for one purpose, and only one purpose , assisted reading. For another thing, the durability of Kindle may arguably be more frail than iPad. I broke my Kindle within a week and had to return it to Amazon for replacement. While one can left iPad on for weeks, one cannot do the same to kindle without its LED display caving in. However, consider its costs,what it was designed to do and what it does, I think it is a charming little assistive device. For $189.00 you get a free Wifi 3G and that alone to me, already justified the cost. 3G wifi normally costs $40 a month, so if your kindle lasts a year or two, it would be economically justifiable. Kindle comes with text to speech voice navigation, and also text to speech narration, although its choice of voice engine left something to be desired, nonetheless the functionality is there,...

June 4th is a very important date to me, no, it's not because it was on that day of 1989, the Chinese government ordered a general crackdown on Tianmen square students, but it was on June 4th, 2010, when I obtained my iPhone 3GS which fundamentally changed my life. The first device to be banished was my much beloved iPod Touch (which I gave to my sister), second device I retired as the result of the iPhone was my 7 years old Fuji Digital camera, which I probably chucked it under the bed somewhere, the third was my Citizen Eco Drive Watch, which I gave to my dad. It is becoming fairly apparent, that the mighty Apple iPhone was designed to be an Omni-purpose all encompassing PDA, those who claim apple iPhone 4G is inferior to HTC Droid because it comes with a 5 Megapixel as opposed to 8 Megapixel have completely missed the point. The attraction of the apple iPhone lies with the tens of thousand third party applications for us technophiles to swim in, those third party appl...

As an assistive technology advocate, it has been a part of my job to write up a requisition form for devices in the lab, and perhaps due to the ethnic/cultural heritage; the price tag on those devices simply did not make sense, and of course, buying them at those prices made even less sense to me. Although I have to concede, devices built by Enhanced Vision really is in a league of their own, but still, how does one expect a $10.00 per hour wage earning lower middle class person to afford $2800.00 device affectionately named "Merlin" or "Jordy"? Even naming them Chi-Hung Luke Hsieh wouldn't make them more affordable! When my supervisor saw the 13 years old webcam that I have lying around in my office, he asked me if I could turn it into an electronic magnifier using a Windows computer and USB port. The technology involved really isn't rocket science; as a matter of fact, Bierly Trademark has a USB based monomouse magnifier selling at about $500 a piece,...

After spending two articles lauding Apple to the moon, let's come back to reality and examine assistive software for Windows PC. A few articles ago, I wrote about Ginger, a grammar assisting software that may provide tremendous help for people with dyslexia. However, thanks to Google Adsense, I was introduced to another grammar software that purportedly does the same thing. That was when my curiosity kicked in, and I could not resist buying a copy of my own to compare. There is another less high sounding side story to why I bought the Whitesmoke software: Mainly, I was duped.  On their website, it stated that a discount offer of 80% on their software was going to end on April 21st 2010, well a month later, the same website still offers the identical discount with the dates changed. I am not here to discuss whether such antics are ethical, as ethics always take second place in the face of profits; the point is that I now have both Ginger and Whitesmoke, so let's do a compari...