Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard, the development nickname for Macintosh OSX version 10.6, is available for sale today.
It has new accessibility features.

PCWorld article on these.

I’m particularly interested in the mirroring the screen with the trackpad feature. The trackpads on the new unibody laptops are huge. And I recall that Apple has patents on some haptic feedback touchscreen ideas. Could a built-in braille reader in the Macbook be possible?

Must remember to do a blog post about Windows 7 when it comes out.

Braille e-book

http://www.yankodesign.com/2009/04/17/braille-e-book/

This isn’t out on the market yet, but this is a promising design.

Test for accessibility

So I ran this blog through this automated app that tests sites for Section 508 compliance. I passed.

However, I think I can do better. Especially with color choice, since brown-on-tan isn’t terribly high-contrast. And the default font size is quite small. People with vision impairments but not total blindness might have difficulty with the default stylesheet.

More on this later…

Amazon caves to buggy whip manufacturerc

NY Times

The fact is, I blather a lot on this blog, but I don’t actually have a disability. Read this blog post about this written by someone who is actually affected by the issue.

Scroll down on his post and read his related posts on the issue.

As well as the American Foundation for the Blind’s take on it.

Tablature in Braille

How does one who uses a braille display read tab?
Being a primarily graphical method of communication, it doesn’t really do much for people who cannot see.

Turtle Dove for banjo in tab

Here is a solution.

There are two ways of thinking about this alternate method.
First, it would be interesting to create a computer script that could translate this automatically.
Alternately, this is a good project for crowdsourcing. If every guitar player or banjo player translated one song into the new notation, each person would only contribute a small amount of work, but the cumulative work completed would be enormous.

This is the concept behind One to One-Thousand by Sam Sennott. How much work could we get done if we all contributed a small amount toward the same end?

UPDATE:

Check this out. The crowdsourcing has already begun.

updated post

Disabilities in pop culture 4

Zatoichi, the Blind Samurai

And none of this 2003 remake crap.


There were something like a thousand Zatoichi films and there was always, always some damsel in distress that needed rescuing.

Sometimes being blind can be an asset. (See also Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark)

Disabilities in Pop Culture

Esquire has a list that I’m not sure if I should be amused or offended by.

“The Five Most Incredible Physically Disabled Action Movie Heroes”

It is a little surprising to me that Zatoichi, the Blind Samurai is not on this list.

Actual (not hypothetical) games

It seems I’m not the only person thinking about accessible video games. Awesome (since I’m not in a position to do anything but think about them). Some people are out there making games.
New York Times reports on a music-mixing game called AudiOdyssey that is designed to be playable by sighted and blind users. This one has been around for a while.

You can download AudiOdyssey here.

AudiOdyssey was created as part of a student thesis at MIT. Read Eitan Glinert’s thesis here.

Eitan has created a game company called Firehose Games to create more accessible games. I wish them luck, and I’ll be checking in on their progress as I get further in my career of combining recreational therapy with speech and language.

In addition to that, XBox Live has a game called In The Pit that is an audio-only, single-player action game. It sounds a lot like Be the Wumpus.

video game design cont’d

To recap.

We have realistic audio physics with doppler and echoes. 5.1 surround if possible, but stereo at the very least. Rumble support for tactile/haptic feedback as well. Menus and status information supports braille devices.

Let’s go full-bore. Let’s remake Quake3, Counterstrike or Team Fortress 2 in the dark.

Like this, only much, much darker...

This is the full FPS, multiplayer version of Be the Wumpus. The graphics will be blank, or at least have no impact on gameplay at all.

Video game brainstorm

I’m throwing this out there with no claim to copyright. Anyone who wants to take this and run with it is free to do so.

Time for a remake of Hunt the Wumpus (more precisely, Be the Wumpus)

Screenshot of Be the Wumpus gameplay.

My imaginary version is:

WiiWare download.

Full stereo support. With doppler and echo physics.

Don’t forget the Wiimote has its own speaker. (Sonar? Ping and echo?)

Rumble.

The Wiimote is getting a gyroscope for full-motion detection.

Environmental sound effects to create and navigate a map.

No graphics. Maybe not a blank screen, but the visuals don’t impact gameplay. This is a tactile- and audio-only game.

Wumpus, in my mind, is just an experiment of the mechanics. Ideally what I’d like is to make a multiplayer First Person Shooter that could be played blind. Anyone who’s ever played Counterstrike or Unreal Tournament (or even Mario Kart in versus mode) knows how much fun it is to blow up friends. Unfortunately, this is a pleasure mostly unavailable to people who are blind. (There are audio-only games available. I just don’t believe any of them are multi-player frag-fests.)

I mention Counterstrike in particular above because the audio in that game is particularly important to gameplay.

If you could get the sonar mechanic right and the audio physics designed correctly, it would be possible to make a maze-running, multi-player deathmatch without any visuals.