Handheld device will help the blind read

Kurzweil National Federation of the Blind Reader has gotten quite a bit of ink on the listservs. Though a bit pricey at $3,500 - the price is sure to come down as popularity grows. Several ATHEN members and others on the listservs are doing some Beta testing on this and other products.

The Web and the Law (VodCast)

The New Jersey Higher Education Webmasters Association [yes .. such an organization does exist!] presented on Warrent-less searches, ID Theft, Responsibility for Content and (of course) the ADA. Along with the outline on the website - they have been kind enough to provide a 90+ minute video podcast of the presentation. The quaility could be better but the content is worth kickin back and watching.

Advice To Students: Pack A Mac

Unless ... of course ... you need to deal with a little thing called "access technology"

Taming the Digital Beast

Is your digital institutional repository out of control? It’s time to step back and look at contribution, access, rights, storage, and functionality—issues you don’t want to monkey with.

I like Campus Technology and enjoy my subscription very much - I recommend everyone partake. Love this picture, too. But don't bother to read the article for its accessibility content. Oh well ... maybe next time.

Progress in the Captcha Department - AFB's Blog

To the left are Captcha's - those distorted and scrambled boxes of letters and numbers used by websites to tell friend (human) from foe (other computers). Top to bottom we have examples from PayPal, Yahoo, Hotmail, TicketMaster and AOL. CAPTCHA is a trademarked name belonging to Carnegie Mellon University and stands for completely automated public turing-test to tell computers and humans apart. If you want to know what a "turing test" is check out the Wikipedia posting.

We in the AT field do not like Captcha's for the simple reasons that they are inaccessible for the visually impaired (in particular) and a general pain in the butt for everyone else (especially those with mobility issues that make excessive typing difficult). Heck, even with eyesight and ambulation I sometimes have trouble figuring out these darn things.

MIT's "seeing machine" for the legally blind

From Engadget:

MIT's got a new machine in the works that will offer some discrete seeing abilities to the 1.3 million legally blind in the US without the need for invasive retinal implants. Though it's not portable and doesn't (yet) support video feeds, the 12 x 6 x 6-inch "seeing machine" developed by Elizabeth Goldring, a senior fellow at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, enables users to control virtual 3D environments, view images, or read documents by way of an LED eyepiece that projects images directly onto the retinas of those with limited vision. We assume the consumer application of such a device is only eventual, but for now it remains with at MIT for development, so, um, keep an eye out.