Is anyone else surprised by the physically-disabled people in their user stories using a regular MacBook keyboard as their primary input device? Ok, the man with quadriplegia also uses a joystick. It amazes me how inaccessible better hardware is.
The woman who is deaf blind uses a refreshable braille keyboard. I looked up the cost and it's ~$3000USD. Even if some nonprofit organization pays for this, you still need parents and caregivers that know to take advantage of this.
I have no hardware experience, but I think I may take on the task of making life easier for some people with disabilities.
Quick ideas that popped to mind while watching the user stories:
1. Using AI to transcribe videos for people to have a standalone captions source other than their video player.
2. Several of the users use the tab key to fill out forms. Hell, Google search is nigh-impossible to use as keyboard only; Good luck with smaller sites. Some sort of open source project for handling tabbing logically would be awesome. Maybe a chrome extension that lets devs interface with it a la sponsorblock.
3. I'm fascinated by refreshable braille now. It's expensive because the technology seems pretty niche. I'm very uneducated on this topic but it feels like a cruder technology would also work, at the cost of size or throughput. There also don't seem to be any phones/portables with this capability.
I'd love to get into something like this, but don't know how. If you are in this sort of space, I'd love to talk.
- see hable one. A few FOSS variants have been tried but failed
- look up “switch boxes”
- look up “eyegaze” hardware
Truth is hardware is actually hard to get absolutely right. Software - now there’s tons of space on this. The problem is identifying the big pinch points. If anyone there wants to help us look at these priorities
> 3. I'm fascinated by refreshable braille now. It's expensive because the technology seems pretty niche. I'm very uneducated on this topic but it feels like a cruder technology would also work, at the cost of size or throughput. There also don't seem to be any phones/portables with this capability.
This [1] was posted a few months ago and was an interesting read.
Wow, thanks for this link. This is so in depth, I'm definitely going to read it later more than my quick skim. Looks like a good idea to use rotating wheels, too
$3000 is a not so great one as well. They can go up to $16k for some 80 cell models. 20 cell ones have gotten pretty cheap, though. (Relatively speaking.) Being blind is expensive.
The woman who is deaf blind uses a refreshable braille keyboard. I looked up the cost and it's ~$3000USD. Even if some nonprofit organization pays for this, you still need parents and caregivers that know to take advantage of this.
I have no hardware experience, but I think I may take on the task of making life easier for some people with disabilities.
Quick ideas that popped to mind while watching the user stories: 1. Using AI to transcribe videos for people to have a standalone captions source other than their video player. 2. Several of the users use the tab key to fill out forms. Hell, Google search is nigh-impossible to use as keyboard only; Good luck with smaller sites. Some sort of open source project for handling tabbing logically would be awesome. Maybe a chrome extension that lets devs interface with it a la sponsorblock. 3. I'm fascinated by refreshable braille now. It's expensive because the technology seems pretty niche. I'm very uneducated on this topic but it feels like a cruder technology would also work, at the cost of size or throughput. There also don't seem to be any phones/portables with this capability.
I'd love to get into something like this, but don't know how. If you are in this sort of space, I'd love to talk.