Empowering Technologies

MobileASL- Video compression project at the University of Washington

This news is taken from the MobileASL website which has a video about the project and an explanation:

"With the advent of cell phone PDAs with larger screens and photo/video capture, people who communicate with American Sign Language (ASL) could utilize these new technologies. However, due to the low bandwidth of the U.S. wireless telephone network, even today's best video encoders likely cannot produce the quality video needed for intelligible ASL. Instead, a new real time video compression scheme is needed to transmit within the existing wireless network while maintaining video quality that allows users to understand semantics of ASL with ease. For this technology to exist in the immediate future, the MobileASL project is designing new ASL encoders that are compatible with the new H.264/AVC compression standard using x264 (nearly doubling compression ratios of MPEG-2). The result will be a video compression metric that takes into account empirically validated visual and perceptual processes that occur during conversations in ASL.

People already use cell phones for sign language communication in countries like Japan and Sweden where 3G (higher bandwidth) networks are ubiquitous. See videos from Sweden.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. IIS-0514353 and IIS-0811884, Sprint, Nokia, and HTC."

Free HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff accessibility scan

The AbilityNet news item asks: "Is your website accessible? If you do not know the answer to this question why not let us help answer it for you. AbilityNet has partnered with HiSoftware to provide HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff, a powerful enterprise accessibility validation solution. Amongst its functionality Compliance Sheriff can scan your Web site for over 172 accessibility checks including images, forms, and dynamic content.

What will I get?

We will scan a representative sample of your site and send you your HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff report in the form of a PDF document. If you would like to see what you would receive you can download a sample PDF report (360KB). This sample report is of an anonymous site (we have removed the urls) and represents a scan of only 10 pages (to keep the report relatively short).

What do I need to do next?

If you would like AbilityNet to scan your website for you, and provide you with your HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff report within a few working days, please complete the following form with the required information.

Unfortunately we are only able to provide one scan per customer and are not able to offer a recheck scan of your site.

If you have any questions about your free accessibility report, or for more information on HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff, please call our sales team on 01926 464095 or email sales@abilitynet.org.uk."

Sight & Sound Exhibitions

Sight and Sound have a wide range of equipment that can provide support for those who are blind or have visual impairments or specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia. They have several special offers on the prices of some of their magnification, braille and speech output products.

Entry is FREE to the Sight & Sound Exhibition on the 18th March between 10am - 4pm and it is being held at: The Rooper Hall, 5 Victoria Park, Moordown, Bournemouth, BH9 2RB

On Thursday, 8th April, 2010 Sight and Sound in association with Surrey Association for Visual Impairment have an exhibition at Camberley High Cross Church Hall, Knoll Road, Camberley, GU15 3SY

ICCHP 2010 - 12th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs

"ICCHP will be held for the 12th time in 2010. It looks back to more than 20 years of supporting the advancement of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Assistive Technologies (AT) for people with disabilities, the aging population and learning difficulties."

"ICCHP focuses on all aspects related to Assistive Technologies (AT) and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for people with disabilities. According changes in awareness and understanding of disability as well as social and legal frameworks, driven by Disability Rights and Independent Living Movements led to what is known as eAccessibility, Universal Design or eInclusion. User involvement and user centred design are the underlying general topic of ICCHP leading to an interdisciplinary discussion of all stakeholders in the value chain that allows social innovation in the information society.
Interfacing the existing and emerging Human-Computer Interface is and will stay a key issue if ICCHP.
ICCHP provides a unique platform for end users, researchers, developers and practitioneers including amongst others:

A scientific conference presenting and discussing reviewed papers (~50% acceptance rate) which will be published in SPRINGER Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
A pre-conference including major German spoken events and Workshops/Tutorials and Meetings.
Special Thematic Sessions organised, chaired and supervised for publishing by leading experts to provide a comprehensive overview to very specific aspects of eAccessibility and eInclusion.
A Young Researchers Consortium to support the formation of the next generation of experts in eAccessibility and eIcnlusion.
A Summer University for young blind students intending to enter math, science and engineering studies.
Facilities to organise Workshops/Tutorials or Meetings.
Space for Exhibition and Poster Presentations.
Handing over the ICCHP Roland Wagner Award sponsored by the Austrian Computer Society.
An agreable Social Programme in the charming town of Vienna "

New MacSpeech Scribe for Transcription

Ricky Buchanan mentioned in his ATMac Blog of February 13, 2010 that, "one of the major things that the MacSpeech Dictate family has been lacking is the ability to take pre-recorded files and convert them to text. Not any more: MacSpeech Scribe will do just that for you, with up to 99% accuracy.

MacSpeech Scribe will accept any file in one of these formats:

.wav
.aif or .aiff
.m4v, .mp4, or .m4a

Audio file quality will affect the quality of your recognition, of course, so using a certified recording device is recommended, but not required - anything that will produce the correct file format will work. At the moment, the iPhone, iPod Touch, and several Olympus digital voice recorders are the only devices certified but I would expect that MacSpeech expands this range fairly quickly.

Recording a sound file to run through Scribe is pretty much like using MacSpeech Dictate itself, but without the ability to correct and train phrases as you go. If you want your transcribed document to include punctuation, you need to speak the punctuation signs into the recording, and you need to train MacSpeech Scribe to the voice of the person who recorded the audio file before it can transcribe.

So what are the limitations? Bear in mind that I have not had access to MacSpeech Scribe myself, but these are the limits that have been described by MacSpeech or can be inferred from the behaviour of other products in the MacSpeech family:

Read more about the transcription limitations.

Portable programs for phonics - Phonics Toolbox

An email to the Becta SENIT mail list from David Lane of Xavier software said:

"We've taken 4 of the core Xavier programs and installed them on to a usb drive which may be plugged into most personal computers running Windows.

There's a general-purpose spelling practice program with a huge bank of recorded words, another to cover Magic-E, a 'spelling in sentences' look/cover/copy program, and finally, 'Sound & Rhymes' covers short vowels, CVC words, Consonant Blends etc.

You may add your own new content (typed word lists, sound recordings) and carry these on the usb drive which will also store the activity reports generated by the programs."

For further details please visit:
http://xavier.bangor.ac.uk/xavier/xesdongle.shtml