Students Work on AT for the Blind, Google Maps, Employment Sites, & Creature Discomforts

 A few small stories for you:

Usability Meets Security: Professor, students address challenges facing blind computer users

http://www.towson.edu/main/abouttu/newsroom/usability031408.asp 

"As crucial as they are to thwarting spam, CAPTCHAs present a formidable obstacle to blind or visually impaired users." So 2 professors and an undergraduate computer information systems major at Towson University set out to find alternitive CAPTCHAs "...that would be equally usable by people with and without impairments."

Read the article to find out more.

Sight for the Blind and Speech for the Deaf:  AProfessor Turns Cellphones into aids for the Disabled

http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i42/42a01302.htm 

"Ms. Narasimhan, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, soon became the hub for [4] student research projects that develop technologies to assist the disabled by doing such tasks as identifying buses or translating sign language into spoken words. Their creations turn the most ubiquitous device on a college campus — the cellphone — into an independence-enhancing machine."

Besides the project mentioned above, the other 3 projects are technology that will allow people (any person) to not only access local bus schedules from their cellphone, but also detirmine whether busses are running on time, enable cellphones to read UCP codes so that a blind user can easilly identify a product, and allow redially avalible cellphone cameras to become currency readers.

2 of these projects caught my interest. The first is the currency reader, being this is a hot button issue at the moment. The second is the ability to pull up bus schedules and current locations at a moments notice.

Some people I know don't understand why I don't use the bus at all. Becaue I qualify for paratransit, all I have to do is flash my yellow ID card and the bus is free. Bus schedules are why. My eye tracking is bad. I don't see anyway that I can read a bus schedule. I'd probably have to have it read to me. If I were to go to the same place at the same time of day repeatedly, well then I'd probably have that memorized, but what if that bus doesn't show? Then what? I won't know any of the other times. Completely randomly, recently I came to know that in addition to driving dirrections, google maps will complete your trip by public transportation, including such details as walk from your building to X corner for the bus, and how many minutes it takes to walk there. Plug in the time you need to get there by and they even give you 3 different options to choose from. That's great! If I miss the bus, I have the next one already written down. But what if I go somewhere and have no idea what time I'm leaving? Then what? If I had something at my fingertips that could read to me the next bus, I'd take the bus all the time.

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Recently I got an email with a link to this site. It says the employment sites are targted at college students, but the job postings I saw looked like anyone could appy.

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And lastly, I'm on the update list for the Creature Discomforts Campaign, even though I don't live in the UK. The email I got said, "Leonard Cheshire Disability unveils six brand new Creature Discomforts characters online [last Thurday] ... From next Wednesday and throughout the summer the characters will appear in adverts on ITV, online and at bus stops. The adverts will be gradually revealed online over the next two weeks."