Accessibility

This Sunday, I'll be talking about accessibility, because not everyone can "surf" through the web (or the real world) as easily as most of us do, and a simple image, sound, ou improperly placed tag can become a major hurdle for someone with impaired vision, sight, or motor abilities.

Let's start with the:

Intel Reader

I know eBooks are all the rage right now, but considering how some "stupid" rights management issues are - making it impossible for you to listen to an ebook reader, for instance - maybe it's not such a bad idea to stick with the plain old paper books for a while longer.This Intel Reader scans and does OCR on it, and reads it back aloud.



It's a pity it costs $1,500 USD! As I find it hard to believe you wouldn't be able to do the same with the hardware you get in a $350 netbook.


Visually impaired Google search

Google has a visually impaired search page allowing you to quickly and easily browse through search results using the keyboard and better integrated with screen readers.
It's an experimental feature for accessibility enhancements but it might be worth it - try it out.

Freedom Leg - crutches B-gone


If you ever had to hop around in crutches, see how much better you'd be with one of there Freedom Leg devices. With the billions spent in medical research each year, why didn't they come up with this sooner?

Speaking without Talking

If speaking is no problem for most of us (some might even have a problem not speaking!) there are thousands of people out there where every single word is a pain.

Thanks to Audeo they'll soon be able to speak just by thinking about it. The tiny electrical impulses from your brain will be picked up by an electronic device and spoken alound by a digital voice.

I can already imagine a cell phone manufacturer wanting to use this technology to power up their hands-free device. Imagine to be able to talk on your cellphone in the middle of a restaurante (or even inside a movie theater) without anyone listening to you! :)


Painting with you Eyes

Thanks to the EyeWriter, which you can build yourself using cheaply available components like PS3's EyeCam even paralyzed people can interact with a computer using their eyes.


The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

And to think so much money is often wasted in "professional medical devices" costing thousands more and doing infinitely less!

Detecting H1N1 Flu with Thermal Cameras

Need to quickly identify possible H1N1 flu cases in a large group of people?

Just use one of these thermal imaging cameras.

With a resolution of 384 x 288, this HM300 camera can show temperature variations of 0.1ºC - making it very easy to identify anyone with a body temperature above normal range (though - truth be told - it won't tell you if that fever is actually being caused by the H1N1 flu or any other infection.)

However, I can already imagine the number of people wishing they had one of these cameras to keep away from anyone showing up "hot" in its display. :)

Nanoparticled Teeth

You may think that nanoparticles and teeth don't mix... but you'd be mistaken.

Thanks to a semiconductor polishing technique, a professor says it's possible to make the teeth so slick no bad bacteries can stick to it.

Well, here's something I (and many more millions of people) wouldn't mind seeing put into action as soon as possible!

Scotch Tape generates X-Rays

Apparently it is a known fact for quite sometime - but it's news to me - that unpeeling scotch tape generates light and X-Rays.

What they didn't know was that those X-Rays are more powerful than they expected. Some researchers at UCLA have shown that regular scotch tape can be used to x-ray the bones in the human body.

This kind of energy release — known as triboluminescence and seen in the form of light — occurs whenever a solid (often a crystal) is crushed, rubbed or scratched. It is a long-known, if somewhat mysterious, phenomenon, seen by Francis Bacon in 1605. He noticed that scratching a lump of sugar caused it to give off light.

The leading explanation posits that when a crystal is crushed or split, the process separates opposite charges. When these charges are neutralized, they release a burst of energy in the form of light.

However, before you start worrying about going to your office dressed in a protective lead outfit or throwing out all scotch tapes out the window, keep in mind this only happens when the scoth tape is in a vacuum... or so they say...