Category: Technology

Innovative Ideas Braillie App and Dyslexie

The power of technological innovation is sometimes astounding.

BraillieTouch

Mario Romero a post-doctoral researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology has co-developed an app, called BrailleTouch, that could help blind people send text messages and type e-mails on touch-screen smartphones. The free app, which is being developed for Apple iOS and Google Android devices, should be available in a matter of weeks.

Dyslexie

A Dutch graphic designer and dyslexic, Christian Boer, developed a font specifically for dyslexic readers. The Dyslexie font works by tweaking the appearance of certain letters of the alphabet that dyslexics commonly misconstrue, such as “p”, “b” and “d,” to make them more distinct from each other and to keep them “tied down,” so that the reader is less likely to flip them in their minds. The letters in the font are also spaced wide apart to make reading them easier.

The font is  available for purchase, in either English or Dutch, from Boer’s website in English or Dutch.  The font can be used on either the Mac or Windows operating system, but not on devices such as iPads. However, a software company called LingApps says it will soon offer an assistive reading and writing application for iPad that uses Dyslexie.

Some  U.S. schools are now using the font ,but there’s not yet been any major study by a educational system or government to gauge the font’s value in teaching young dyslexics how to read.  Boer does not tout the font as a “cure” for dyslexia but as a tool that can help individuals with dyslexia.

Check out Scientific American’s deeper dive into the project, which includes a link to a Dyslexie version of the article, so you can compare it to the magazine website’s font.

For details on how Boer created the font, check out this video.

The Campus ICT Accessibility Conversation

Technology and the Internet have revolutionized the way we teach at the postsecondary level as well as the way students learn. As Ben McNeely points out in Educating the Net Generation, (2005), today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach. Today’s students, K through college, represent the first generations to grow up with their entire lives surrounded by, and using, computers, video games, digital music players, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. In this ubiquitous environment, given the sheer volume of their interaction with technology, today’s students think and process information much differently than their counterparts from earlier generations.

ICT Accessibility in Higher Education Network

Not long ago, I joined a LinkedIn group, ICT Accessibility in Higher Education Network which was created to bring together faculty, staff, instructional technologists, college and university IT decision-makers, students with disabilities, educational publishers/vendors, and all others in the higher education community who are actively involved or have an interest in ensuring that information and communication technology (ICT) being used or being considered for adoption is accessible to everyone, especially people with disabilities. (In this group, ICT includes the full range of technology used for in-class or remote delivery of instruction, online course registration systems/learning management systems, campus websites/portals, library technology, career center software, and social media used to engage existing or attract new students.)

ICT Goal

The goal of this group is to broaden the campus ICT accessibility conversation to include everyone who has a role in the selection, purchase, implementation, support/training on, and use of technology in the college and university setting, in and out of the classroom. Group moderator, Jennison Asuncion, initiated discussion by asking members to, “identify key information and communication technology accessibility challenge(s) facing people with disabilities on your campus.

Common Themes and Issues

The comments and related discussion have been thoughtful and several familiar themes and issues have emerged, including:

  • Convincing leadership at higher levels in our organization that technology accessibility is a priority. Creating accessible technology and web sites allows persons with disabilities equal participation and benefits everyone with better overall design.
  • Effectively integrating the technologies used by students with other technologies available on campus to support teaching and learning.
  • Inaccessible materials, especially third-party materials (e.g. content management and e-mail systems, textbooks, videos etc.)

I believe that this group will be a valuable resource for all participants for we can learn from one another and little by little, perhaps get the message out that accessibility isn’t just for students with disabilities. As assistive technologies are becoming part of the mainstream (e.g. the text to speech and speech to text on the iPad) universities are going to need to respond with accessible content so that the general student body can access materials on multi-modal devices.

Going to the Cinema?

Video but no Audio

Exercise in any sports club or fitness club and you are likely to see banks of television screens suspended from the ceiling. These screens are usually in the equipment area and each is tuned to a different station – with no audio. Intended to “entertain” users of the various pieces of cardiovascular or weight training equipment, much of the equipment is sophisticated enough that it is possible to plug in a set of headphones and pass the time away watching and listening to whatever program strikes your fancy.

But I digress. What interests me about this scenario is the silence of the televisions. In the environment of a fitness center, the absence of audio is the norm and is accepted whereas in other settings it would not be.

I thought about this recently when I read a news item from the BBC about an innovative project from Sony Digital Cinema that could make going to movies a more tempting option for deaf and hard of hearing individuals. Sony has an developed an experimental pair of glasses that will allow movie goers to see on-screen subtitles, even when none are being projected. The glasses are for use primarily by the deaf and hard-of-hearing, and use LEDs to provide a heads-up display, superimposed over the movie. The words appear to the eye to be the same distance away as the movie screen, just like any other heads-up-display.

Subtitle Glasses Anyone?

The average moviegoer dislikes subtitles. For the hearing impaired, this creates a dilemma: few theaters run films with subtitles or closed captioning, or if they do, the captioned showings are often limited to specific days and times, making DVD and Blu-ray releases the only reliable option for watching movies.

The subtitle glasses have a great deal of potential. For hearing-impaired movie buffs, the glasses will enable them to attend any screening rather than having to schedule their lives around special subtitled showings. The glasses could also be used to show different foreign-language subtitles to different viewers. Sony believes that the subtitle glasses have the potential for other applications too. The glasses could incorporate a small microphone and voice recognition software, providing real-time subtitles. This feature would make simultaneous conversation transcription possible so that deaf people could read what’s being said to them during the course of a conversation.

How the Subtitle Glasses Work

The glasses look a bit like the shutter glasses you have to wear when watching a 3D film, but the hardware on either side of the lenses actually projects the subtitles on the glass. So no matter where the viewer is looking, they’re still visible. Similar to active 3D glasses, the subtitle glasses need to have some way of syncing with a film to track proper subtitle timing. The subtitle glasses are one of the more practical and realistic implementations of augmented reality  but they aren’t perfect. Unlike regular subtitles which always sit at the bottom of the screen, those displayed by the glasses follow the movement of the head. Get used to it though; this could become a feature, eliminating the need to keep glancing down. Although the glasses are in the prototype stage now, if they ever do go into production, the electronics will be streamlined so that the glasses don’t look so bulky.

Sony anticipates that the glasses will not only to be welcomed by hard of hearing cinema-goers, but also by the film industry and cinemas around the world.  In theory, the glasses should encourage higher audience numbers at movie theaters meaning both the film companies and the cinemas make more money. Although Sony indicates they have more trials to carry out to perfect the technology, it is expected that the glasses will begin appearing in UK theaters in 2012. To see the glasses in use: Cinema subtitle glasses give promise to deaf film fans