Hello Haptic flash cards

Tactile Flash Cards for the Blind via Yanko Design

The haptic flashcards were designed by people from the Samsung Design Membership, and were awarded the 2009 Silver International Design Excellence Award:

Designers:

Rhea / Young Soo -- Hongik University
Sunmin -- Ewha Women’s University
Sae Hee--Hanyang University

"The Hello Haptic set of flash cards works with Braille text and other tactile elements from environments the student might not otherwise have access to."

Samsung Braille TouchPhone Prototype is Cool: Uses Electric Active Plastic for Functional Tactile Feedback

Here are some interesting things I've come across that hold potential for children, teens, and adults with visual impairments:

From the Tuvie blog: Braille Concept Phone for Visually Challenged People

"Braille phone is a universal cellular phone concept that is able to produce Braille code in a particular part of it by using Electric Active Plastic to make it usable for visually handicapped people. The phone has been designed in a simple and easy to use manner and looks like a television remote control. The Braille area provides all the information that a traditional screen of a cell phone displays so that visually impaired people can read them by touching it. It provides letter blocks in two by three dot matrixes and by using this principle on buttons, visually challenged people can easily create or read text messages. This braille phone just won Red Dot Awards 2009."






Information from the Samsung website:

SAMSUNG's Braile Mobile Phone Wins Gold Award at the IDEA 2006 Awards (7/2006)

Earlier version:




RELATED:



SPICEMOBILEPHONES

Touch Sight: Camera for the blind may open a lot of eyes





IEEE Spectrum Electric Flex

Brainport Vision Device enables people who are blind see in 3D via tongue.

The best part of this video is when the man is able to play a games (tic-tac-toe & rock, paper, scissors) with is daughter as he uses the vision device:


(The father depicted in the video is Erik Weihenmayer, who is a professional mountaineer and motivational speaker. He's the only blind person to have climbed the "Seven Summits", the highest points on each continent.)

Photo courtesy of engadget

The system uses a head-mounted video camera which takes in visual information and translates it into electric patterns on a tab placed on the tongue in such a was that 3D representation is interpreted by the brain.



It should be noted that the BrainPort vision device is investigative and not yet available for sale.

RELATED

BrainPort Vision

Lollipop Helps Reveal Shapes To the Blind
Ibby Caputo, Washington Post, 7/21/09

Publications

(Also posted on the Interactive Multimedia Technology blog.)

New Assistive Technologies for the Visually Impaired: WebAnywhere, Trinetra

I came across a couple of newer technologies suitable for children, teens, and adults who have vision impairments. The technologies might also be useful to a wide range of people, including those who do not have a disability.

WebAnywhere is a screen reading interface for the web, developed by Jeffry P. Bighan, Craig M. Prince, Sangyun Hahn, and Richard E. Ladner, of the University of Washington.

Below is information about WebAnywhere from the University of Washington News:

"This is for situations where someone who's blind can't use their own computer but still wants access to the Internet. At a museum, at a library, at a public kiosk, at a friend's house, at the airport," said Richard Ladner, a UW professor of computer science and engineering. The free program and both audio and video demonstrations are at http://webanywhere.cs.washington.edu.

"Online service lets blind surf the Internet from any computer, anywhere"

WebAnywhere Site
WebAnywhere Paper
WebInSight Publications
WebAnywhere Alpha Release


From the Carnegie-Mellon Website:

Trinetra "the third eye" : SmartPhone-based assistive technologies





"Trinetra aims to develop cost-effective, smartphone-enabled assistive technologies to provide people with an enhanced quality of life in their daily activities. The broad objective is to harness the collective capability of diverse networked embedded devices to support location-aware and context-aware applications, including first-responder support, building navigation, retail shopping, smart transportation, etc."

"The project was originally conceived to enable greater independence for the blind and the visually impaired. To date, we have researched and developed a portable barcode-based solution involving an Internet- and Bluetooth-enabled smartphone to aid grocery shopping at the Carnegie Mellon campus convenience store, Entropy."

"We have also more recently extended this to assist both sighted and visually impaired commuters with their transportation and commute-planning needs, using a smart phone to convey notifications of arrivals, departures, etc. We have also developed a phone-based currency identifier for the visually impaired."

Trinetra: Assistive Technologies for Grocery Shopping pdf

Assistive Embedded Technologies pdf Priya Narasimhan

Related:

"Sight for the Blind and Speech for the Deaf: A professor turns cellphones into aides for the disabled"
-Catherine Rampell (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Google Lab's Search for the Visually Impaired

Just a brief post:

Google Labs' search feature for people with visual impairments is a good idea. It has been around since 2006. The search results are displayed to ensure that the top results are websites that work with screen readers and keyboard navigation.

Overview of Accessible Solutions from Google

Google Lab's Accessible Search FAQ

Google Lab's Accessible Users Group