Thoughts on Assistive Technology

As a disabled technophile, my relationship with Amazon (and to a lesser extent, Apple) can only be described as a love-and-hate affair.   That does not mean I love apple more than Amazon, quite the contrary, I use Amazon far more than Apple. Apple has made their iPhone 4S accessible to the visually impaired, and I have seen with my own eyes, how a blind person can overcome touch screen with mixture of voice feedback (Siri) and voice command. Google Android has achieved more or less same level of functionality, so, today’s high-end smart phones, Android, Apple or Windows (for the adventurous) should be accessible for most visually impaired people. What about Amazon Kindle? As far as the E-readers go, the most accessible model for visually impaired remains, Kindle Keyboard 3G. Released in 2010, (the 6” model has been discontinued in 2013, while the DX 9” model costs $299) it is both textile and affordable, and the Neo-speech TTS voice engine combined with voice navigation m...

Michele: Let us leave topic of whether the "so called rich" are more likely to go abroad, I'll come back to this point later. Let's consider your proposal and admit the ones most likely to succeed, (which is basically the German model, and also Ironic, because this model works in Germany precisely because the as a Social Democracy, Germany has achieved "the happy average) I am telling you, if this model is followed in South African context you, will be condemning millions of poor South Africans the opportunity of social mobility, for this very reason alone, unequal technological access...Consider the scenario of reading three chapters for the test next week:  Rich kids: Get picked up in a car, drove home, tell maid to make tea, take out the iPad, or Kindle Fire HD, download the entire book, (under 1 minutes using Fibre optic) drinks his tea, and put on the headphone, text to speech will read the entire 3 chapters in an hour, and he can repeat the process as much ...

Kindle Fire HD – Amazon, have you forgotten something? It just happened that I bought a 7” Kindle Fire HD last week, and Frankly, I loved it; having my Kindle Books, Audible books, Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon music and Amazon Prime videos all accessible from a single device and stored in the cloud makes a geek like me the happiest man on earth, and its HD display and processing speed also give iPad 3 a run for its money, unfortunately though, that’s where the honeymoon ends.  Despite all the hype about its improved Hi-Fi speakers, trust me, you are still better off with a BOSE headphone, but then, for $199.00, I don’t really expect the mini-tablet to produce sounds that matches my $150 earphone, that’s not why I am having a lovers’ quarrel with it, my problem with my very dear, very beloved, very shiny new toy is quite literally, it won’t talk to me, and as everybody knows, communication is very important in a relationship! Even though the quality of the voice engine is st...

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...